Sep 3, 2026 · 32 min · 11 segments
The public plans for a half-a-billion-dollar Sydney development have proton therapy all over them. But they're not the only set. As Australian families continue to fly overseas to get the life-saving…
Julia Bergen
Loretta FlorenceHost
What about everyone else who's looking at this? Are they worried about the proton part of the development, that it won't get up?
Well, a lot of what Tony knows about this project is coming from the developer, from Caraba.
Now, Caraba doesn't have a lease with Sue Bleasel for her proton therapy bunker, and it's clear she needs a lot more money to make it happen.
But Caraba's done its own checks on Sue's plans, and it decides to make proton therapy a big feature when it submits its development for approval.
So they want this approved quickly? They do, and I know that because I've seen some of Caraba's company documents.
And one thing that they show is that Coraba wants to apply for this thing called state significance.
Now, a state significant project is something that's going to benefit, you know, the whole state.
And I can see from these documents that the reason Coraba wants that is to try and minimise the impact of council's planning rules and also to speed
Essentially less red tape, right? If it's state significant, Coraba can get the development approved quicker.
important because Karaba has a limited window to buy the land they want to build on.
We don't buy land that doesn't have development approval.
Come back to us when you've got that.
So Carraba asks for its project to be treated as state significant on the basis that this will be a health research facility valued at more than $30 million.
Okay, and so what does the State Planning Department make of that? They're impressed by the pitch.
And the reason we know that is we got our hands on a trove of emails that were flying around government at the time, all from a Freedom of Information request.
The project is pretty impressive.
I'm trying to grab some exec summary.
Very interesting.
What about everyone else who's looking at this? Are they worried about the proton part of the development, that it won't get up?
Well, a lot of what Tony knows about this project is coming from the developer, from Caraba.
Now, Caraba doesn't have a lease with Sue Bleasel for her proton therapy bunker, and it's clear she needs a lot more money to make it happen.
But Caraba's done its own checks on Sue's plans, and it decides to make proton therapy a big feature when it submits its development for approval.
So they want this approved quickly? They do, and I know that because I've seen some of Caraba's company documents.
And one thing that they show is that Coraba wants to apply for this thing called state significance.
Now, a state significant project is something that's going to benefit, you know, the whole state.
And I can see from these documents that the reason Coraba wants that is to try and minimise the impact of council's planning rules and also to speed
Essentially less red tape, right? If it's state significant, Coraba can get the development approved quicker.
important because Karaba has a limited window to buy the land they want to build on.
We don't buy land that doesn't have development approval.
Come back to us when you've got that.
So Carraba asks for its project to be treated as state significant on the basis that this will be a health research facility valued at more than $30 million.
Okay, and so what does the State Planning Department make of that? They're impressed by the pitch.
And the reason we know that is we got our hands on a trove of emails that were flying around government at the time, all from a Freedom of Information request.
The project is pretty impressive.
I'm trying to grab some exec summary.
Very interesting.
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