Caulfield racecourse suffered a similar fate at the hands of the local council (Glen-Eira) after someone discovered that the land was meant to provide unhindered access for the general public - which is difficult to do when there are horses thundering down the track both on race day and training. Even though the race course is already surrounded by public parkland there were pictures in the local rag of protest groups which included councillors standing behind one of a number of locked gates that were locked for logistical reasons (there are so many gates, and the ones that can be monitored are not locked). In the end a compromise was reached to allow the general public to freely access the racecourse parkland whenever a race meeting was not scheduled. Within a year of that decision large tracts of racecourse parkland were soon converted to high density housing.
Glen-Eira council is notoriously corrupt, and no doubt someone on the payroll was looking after their developer mates in return for a huge kickback so that they could retire to the Gold Coast and call that "living". At least someone in council (rumour has it the police got involved) managed to get one of the developers to build a multi-million dollar children's playground for not following a transparent tender process.