Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services, Housing, Youth and Women) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the member for Batman’s second reading amendment to the Airports Amendment Bill 2006. He has moved:

“whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House condemns the Government for undermining public confidence in the Airports Act through approval decisions such as that relating to the Perth brickworks site, located opposite a residential area, and the Essendon direct factory outlet, proposed without regard to the impact on local road infrastructure”.

While neither of those developments is in my electorate or my city, I have got a lot of sympathy for the sentiments expressed in this amendment, because we have had a recent battle at Sydney airport about the proposed retail precinct that the airport wanted to build there on airport land. It was a disaster of a proposal, and it has been stopped by the minister. I will speak a little bit more about that later.

This bill, amongst other provisions, allows airport lessees to undertake non-aeronautical development as long as it is consistent with the master plan. It requires Australian noise exposure forecasts and flight paths to be included in master plans and to be developed beyond the 20-year planning horizon. It reduces the time for public comment on proposed development plans and requires the airport lessee to demonstrate how it has consulted with local communities.

We think that there are some weaknesses in this bill but we also understand that airports are essential infrastructure in our cities and also support the tourism industry and other industries. I would like to speak a little bit about how the most recent non-aeronautical development proposal around Sydney airport was campaigned on and how we encouraged the minister to reject that proposal.

Obviously any sort of large development in the middle of one of Australia’s biggest cities is going to be controversial, but the development that was proposed for Sydney airport was particularly controversial for a number of reasons. It was controversial for its size. It was controversial also because there was an absolute unwillingness on the part of the airport to consider their responsibility to surrounding communities or to consider their responsibility for the infrastructure demands that would be made by the development. What they were interested in was making a buck—well, there is no crime in that—but there was a complete lack of confidence in people whose communities surround the airport that the proposal was well thought through even in terms of the future development of the airport site. What the federal government has to establish when there is a non-aeronautical development like the proposal put forward by Sydney Airport Corporation is not only whether it is appropriate for the expansion plans of the airport but also what kind of effect it is going to have on the communities living around the airport.

Sydney Airport Corporation put forward a draft development proposal to the Minister for Transport and Regional Services for a massive retail complex. The original draft plan included a substantial cinema complex, and I was very happy to see that defeated after an incredible community campaign led by residents in my area and in the neighbouring seats of Kingsford Smith, Wentworth, Lowe and Grayndler. I must say that the state members of parliament in that area, in particular Kristina Keneally, the member for Heffron, were also very active in seeing that proposal rejected. I hope the fact that this is an election year had nothing to do with the decision to reject that proposal, because I am sure that Sydney Airport Corporation will be back with further proposals. It is worth noting the scale of the proposal they last made. They were talking about an outlet centre of 24,000 square metres, a homemaker centre of 10,000 square metres, food courts of 1,900 square metres, an independent discount store of 12,500 and almost 2½ thousand extra car spaces.

The first thing to say about that is that it is pretty hard to see how it is necessary to have such an enormous new shopping centre when you have Eastlakes just down the road and the SupaCentre five minutes drive away. It is not as though Sydney is short on shops. The other thing we were really very concerned about was the amount of extra infrastructure that would have been required just for people to come and go from this shopping centre. We are talking about $2.7 billion worth of extra roadworks between now and 2024 if that development proposal had gone ahead. Who pays for that $2.7 billion worth of roadworks? It is not the Sydney Airport Corporation, the people who are making all the money out of the retail complex, and it is not the federal government, which gives it the go-ahead; it is in fact the state government that have to pay that $2½ billion, even though they have no say over the size, the scale or the type of the development or whether it should go there in the first place.

I noticed that Brisbane Airport have made voluntary contributions—in fact, quite large ones—to the infrastructure around Brisbane Airport, including hundreds of millions of dollars to roadworks around Brisbane Airport. It is the right thing to do. If you are interested in growing a business like the Brisbane Airport you have to understand that your growth impacts on local communities and that you have a responsibility to the local communities to mitigate some of the most difficult effects for those people.

There is another area that is of enormous concern. It is not just the impacts on the neighbouring residents of the infrastructure and all the extra traffic in and out of the shopping centre when they are already dealing with an awful lot of traffic in that area because of the airport and because of the container terminal down the road at Port Botany. And it is not simply the fact that there are probably plenty of shops in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and not necessarily a demand for a new shopping centre when there is one just down the road. There are also the very serious concerns about what it means to have a massive complex attracting thousands of visitors every day located smack bang in the middle of an airport precinct. Is it necessarily the smartest thing in the world when we are in an international environment of increasing terrorist threat to have people coming and going from airport precincts, hanging around airports when they do not need to be there, and having huge developments with thousands of visitors coming and going right up against the fence of an airport? It is difficult to explain why you would want to increase the risk to the people who are doing their shopping and also increase the threat of a security breach at the airport by having such a massive development in an airport zone.

One of the areas of concern has been a lack of access to a merit appeal process when it comes to development applications on airport sites. I am very pleased that the minister for transport made the right decision in relation to the development proposed at Sydney airport. But we want to be confident that the right decision is made each time and that, if the right decision is not made, there is a decent appeal process in place that people can use. We also, I think, would be much happier with these sorts of developments if we were confident that when non-aeronautical development was taking place on airport land and massive new infrastructure was required to support it—new roads to the airport, expanded roads to the airport, extra public transport, even upgrades of electricity and water networks to the airport—that there was some developer contribution in the way that there is a developer contribution expected of other developments which are opening up new landholdings and so on. We expect them to contribute because we know that they are going to make money out of the new development that they are proposing. It makes sense, in this instance when we are talking about a need for an extra $2.7 billion worth of roadworks alone, that developers should contribute to some of that money. You should not have the external costs passed straight to the taxpayers of New South Wales when all the profits sit with the developer of the airport complex.

I want to finish by saying that airport noise and breaking of curfews continues to be a major issue around Sydney (Kingsford Smith) Airport. I have had constituents from all over my electorate write to me—from Rosebery, from Paddington and from Haymarket—talking about experiences they have had of curfews being broken. A resident from Rosebery complained on behalf of many of his neighbours of the constant noise they are experiencing. A constituent from Paddington told me that one morning planes were flying overhead between six in the morning and 8.30 am every five minutes. After making a complaint to the aircraft noise complaints line, she was told that this was because was some work was being done on the runways. They were unable to tell her when this very intense flyover pattern was going to finish. Another constituent, whose complaint was covered in the Southern Courier and Inner West Courier recently, said that the curfew was being broken regularly. The constituent said that five aircraft a day are breaking the early morning curfew at Sydney airport. Of course, it is not unusual; it has happened before, but it is certainly something that we need to continue to be aware of.

See this speech in context