Minister for WestConnex Stuart Ayres said on Friday that a tunnelling site for the WestConnex motorway tunnel between Haberfield and Rozelle would not be established adjacent to the Leichhardt campus of the Sydney Secondary College.

The agency building the motorway, Sydney Motorway Corporation, had previously indicated it wanted to open the tunnelling site next to the school because of the cost of using an alternative site currently used for a bottle shop.

The owner of the alternative site at Darley Road in Leichhardt, on which there is a Dan Murphy's bottle shop, has said the government would face a compensation bill in the order of $50 million.

In a statement on Friday, Mr Ayres said the site occupied by Dan Murphy's was "the only option that will be included in the project's design when released for public consultation in coming weeks".

"Establishing a temporary tunnelling site between Haberfield and Rozelle will allow us to build the missing link between the M4 and M5 motorways faster and ensure we can give back land for green space to the community," Mr Ayres said.

The decision was welcomed by federal Labor MP Anthony Albanese, who had spoken in Parliament against using land next to the school for tunnelling.

"This reckless proposal would have caused considerable disruption to the education of the almost 1000 students at the high school," Mr Albanese said.

The Inner West Council says neither site should be used for tunnelling. Christina Valentine, co-convenor of community group Leichhardt Against WestCONnex, said the Darley Road site was also inappropriate for a tunnelling location, and said Mr Albanese should also have pushed for its exclusion from the project.

"Darley Road is a sub-standard road, long acknowledged as a traffic and accident blackspot," said Ms Valentine.

"It belies common sense to bring 200 plus trucks onto this site given its history of fatalities," she said.