Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Airports Amendment Bill 2010 and I also welcome the reforms introduced by the minister that are contained in this bill. These reforms are long overdue and they will be very warmly welcomed by local communities around Australia, particularly those who live close to airports. Following the privatisation of airports around Australia, many communities experienced considerable grief. To take the House back just for a moment, in the mid-nineties 22 airports around Australia were privatised as part of the federal government’s future direction for airports. At the time, airports were under the control of federal government law, and in the privatisation many of the conditions under which airports operated were retained. In the process of privatisation, the airports were leased for 50 years with a 49-year extension. As a result, we ended up with private operations on federal government land—therefore, operations which were exempt from state and local government laws.

The reforms in this bill will do three significant things which will be welcomed by local communities. Firstly, they will improve the development approval process with respect to ensuring that developments on airports are integrated with local area development plans. Secondly, there will be much better and broader consultation with local communities with respect to those development plans. Thirdly, there will be a streamlining of approvals relating to aviation matters—in other words, the core business of airports. Aeronautical and aviation matters ought to be streamlined because that is important to the people who use airports.

There are two fundamental categories of problems associated with the development of airports in recent years. The first relates to issues associated with aviation activities and the second relates to the commercial development of the surplus land on airports. I want to speak about both those matters very briefly. In regard to aviation activities, in recent years there has been an increase in air travel right across the world, and so too in Australia. As a result of increased air travel, there has been an increase in the number of air flights, which in turn means more landings and take-offs, and increased noise for those people who live under flight paths or close by airports. In parallel with that is the fact that airports were once located relatively remotely from urban areas and today, as a result of urban sprawl and growth, most airports are located in close proximity to developed areas and some are right in the midst of developed areas. With the increase in aviation activities—increased take-offs and landings, an increased number of passengers and increased traffic on roads leading into and out of airports—we have seen a range of problems as a result of airports being located in the midst of development in metropolitan areas.

It is not surprising that there are problems associated with airport noise and the number of aircraft landing and taking off. But, in my view, that is not the critical problem. The critical problem relates to the commercial non-aviation development at airports as a result of the privatisation process in the mid-nineties. Airports have quite rightly recognised that they have land that is surplus to what is required for aviation purposes. When the airports were privatised the operators looked to use that surplus land for non-aviation activities and, in doing that, they were not required by law to comply with state or local government development plans. That is fundamentally where the real problem lies. If you are going to provide large-scale tracts of land for commercial development purposes then I believe it is most important that that development is consistent with the development plans of the respective planning authorities. I am familiar with airports that have been developed where that has not been the case. I do not know whether it was an unintentional oversight of the federal government at the time or a deliberate intention of the federal government to allow commercial non-aviation development to take place in order to get a better price for the airports. But, whatever the case, over the last decade or so local planning authorities have found their development plans in turmoil as a result of developments on surplus aviation land.

I suspect that that surplus aviation land arises because most airports, and certainly the ones I am familiar with, were established 50 or 60 years ago, maybe 70 years ago, when aircraft were not as well designed and therefore the local communities required larger buffers around the runways in order to ensure the safety of the adjoining community. With the better designed aircraft there is much more certainty about their landing and take-off and much of the land that was originally set aside as buffer is now being used for commercial development. In a nutshell, what these reforms will do is ensure that, if we are going to have non-aviation development of airports, those kinds of developments have to be much more consistent with the development plans of the area, and the reforms do just that. That includes giving local communities the opportunity to look at those developments and to comment on them.

There is much more I could say about the development of airports and I will certainly do so on another occasion. But I welcome these reforms because they are reforms that I know in my own community have been called for for many years. And I know that in my own community they will be welcomed by the local planning authorities and the residents who I represent. I commend this bill and I commend the minister for introducing the reforms relating to this bill because I know that, just as my community will welcome them, so too will other communities that are adjacent to or in close proximity to airports around the country.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a third time.

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