Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

When it comes to Parramatta, there is something seriously wrong with the planning processes in New South Wales. It is not that nothing is going on—in fact, if I look out of my window I see cranes everywhere over the skies of Parramatta. That is a good thing. There is lots and lots of construction activity, and Parramatta depends on the construction industry for around seven per cent of its employment. When I talk to people who do not come from Parramatta, they tell me how great the development is in Parramatta and how Parramatta is really coming ahead. But when I talk to people who actually live there I get a different, quite concerning story.

There are literally tens of thousands of new residences coming online in Parramatta. There are huge increases. When you add them all up it is between a 50 and 100 per cent increase in the number of residences in Parramatta over the next 10 to 20 years. It is a substantial increase. In fact, when you look at the council's promotional video on why you should come to Parramatta, it looks a bit like a Game of Thrones opening title—everywhere there is open land, up goes a building. That is pretty much what is happening in Parramatta. There are lots and lots of new buildings, but unfortunately there has been very little attention to infrastructure that supports existing residents, let alone the tens of thousands of new ones, corralled as they are into really quite small spaces in our suburbs.

Where there is new infrastructure, it is off in the never-never and it is not what was wanted by local councils and residents. It is very much infrastructure that suits the developers, not the people who actually live in our cities. We in Parramatta, Westmead, Carlingford and Toongabbie know how overstretched our infrastructure is now, and we look for the work in the area that will support the growth of our population. It is just not there. We know how many of us get into cars or trains in the morning and head off somewhere else for work, spending two to three hours in transit every day, and we wonder where the jobs will come from for all these new residents. We look for the business centres and we see current business and light and heavy industrial areas being bulldozed for high-rise residential. We look for amenities and we see public land being sold off for medium- or high-density residential. We look for facilities and we see our local pool being closed for development of the stadium. For those who moved to Northmead because the M2 made an easy bus ride into the city, they have just closed the bus lane while they upgrade the M2, so a half-hour trip in the morning is now an hour and a half. One hour a day becomes three hours. We have people living in Northmead who are now pulling out of their local gyms and going to the gym in the city because that is the only way they can delay their trip one way or the other. We lose locally and someone else gains from these really quite appalling decisions that our state government is making.

We see our suburb being turned into a dormitory, a place to sleep but not a place to work or live in our waking hours, a place where you get into the car in the morning and leave and return too late to spend time in your suburb with your neighbours, friends and family to build community or spend money locally in the morning, at lunch or in the afternoon and evening in support of our local economy.

I am not against development. In fact, I believe that there are areas in and around our suburbs where the council should have bitten the bullet on zoning years ago. There are areas where we went to 2½ storeys which are close to stations, public parks and large employers like hospitals, and where the surrounding facilities and jobs would have supported a much higher density, but we did not go there. But we are now going very high density in areas that do not have the facilities to support the growth in population, and those facilities are not even on the planning schedule.

Residential planning seems different from everything else, and the systems and community structures that we need to make a community livable are being ignored at the expense of high-rise residential. I understand the state government's need for revenue and I understand that residential creates an enormous immediate benefit to state governments, but for long-term community development we really have to think of the broader infrastructure that we need.

Planning is not about where a person lives; it is about how a person moves through their city—the extent to which they can recognise their neighbours. It is about being able to drop your kids at school and get to work on time; or having a coffee with or meeting a friend at the local gym in the morning or at a park for a run; or about getting home in time to meet friends for dinner within walking distance from your home. It is about how we live. It is about building livable cities, not just places where we live.

Planning needs to leave space for small businesses to set up and grow. We want our communities to be supported by our own. We are bulldozing older business areas and moving small and emerging businesses out from those low-rental areas and replacing them with glass residential towers. There will not be room for smaller businesses to innovate and incubate if this plan continues to go the way it is going. Big companies like Deloitte are moving in, and that is great, but they do not come in in order to crowd out the small. They come in to support the growth of the small and to grow with them.

Being a city means finding space for new ideas and it means finding lower-rental areas. They are sometimes a little shabbier but are affordable for people to start out in new, innovative businesses. That is as true for business as it is for people trying to buy their first house.

And we need our history. In the north of Parramatta we have a heritage precinct that contains around 70 heritage buildings—more heritage buildings than the Rocks. It dates back to convict times. We have the female convict factory, designed by Greenway; we have the Roman Catholic orphanage; the Gipps Yard, which is the sandstone yard where the convict women were taken straight off the boats and put to work, and is where they lived; and we have Bethel, the first children's hospital in Australia. We have an area which demonstrates the history of incarceration of women for over 220 years. It is estimated that one in five of us are descended from women who were incarcerated there.

And because it was a mental asylum for many of those years it has some of the greatest civic architecture examples in Australia, all within one or two blocks. Virtually every major civic architect is actually represented in that small area. There is less standing of the Cascades Female Convict Factory in Tasmania, it is later than ours and it is on the World Heritage List. Ours is better, still intact, and the state government has even resisted it being on the national register, although it is on the list for consideration now—and I thank the minister for that.

The state government's original plans were to put four- and eight-story residential buildings inside the Gipps Yard—inside the existing sandstone courtyard where the convict women lived, right up against a flying fox colony which is supposed to have a 300-metre exclusion zone. There is very little consideration for the value of this heritage in UrbanGrowth's plans for this site. They have no plans for the heritage. My view has always been that when you have something that valuable you decide what to do with the heritage assets first and all other development comes after that. The heritage cannot be replaced and it is not acceptable to my community that we have one of the great convict heritage assets of Australia totally surrounded and overshadowed by buildings as high as 24 storeys without consideration of the heritage assets. It really is an extraordinary plan that the state government has for this particular area.

It also does not provide the amenities in that area that people need. The original area for development included the swimming pool. The original plans had the swimming pool rezoned as residential. The state member at the time, Geoff Lee, said, 'Oh no, that's just a typo.' It was a typo on three places in the plan, but let's believe it was actually a typo! So we all breathed a sigh of relief and thought, 'Okay'. Then I was told a month ago, when UrbanGrowth came to my office, that they had delayed all plans about the swimming pool because they were reconsidering that whole precinct. Then we found out four weeks later—just last week—that there are plans to close the pool completely. The council was told the pool would close because the larger Parramatta Stadium would be on its footprint.

I am a great fan of building a larger stadium, by the way. The Wanderers and the Eels use that stadium and we should have a larger stadium. But it seems nonsense to me that we would close the 50-year-old Parramatta War Memorial Pool. It is the best pool in Western Sydney for training and for diving. It has a high-diving tower—there are only two in Sydney—and it has a water polo pool, a kids pool and a water slide. Five hundred kids come there every day from the schools to learn to swim. We have an active learn-to-swim program there. Why would we close a place where people actually exercise in the middle of their work day in the CBD, or learn to swim, in favour of a place where people go to watch people exercise? Now, I understand that watching people exercise is also a way to encourage people to exercise. But you do not close a place where people do exercise in order to build a bigger place to encourage people to exercise when there will be nowhere then to exercise. It is just nonsense. The community is incredibly concerned about this.

Meanwhile, the state member is saying, 'No, no, no—there is no plan.' Well, the Wanderers are tweeting about the demolition date. The original announcement said that the stadium was going to be over the pool. Now the member is saying that there is no plan. He is also saying that the state government should move the pool, but there is no plan to do that either. There is no plan. We are talking about losing one of the fundamental exercise and recreational spaces within Parramatta at the moment and it is not necessary: we can have both! We can have a place to exercise and a place to watch it. We can have both a community facility for recreation and a commercial facility for recreation. We can have both, and we should.

Then, of course, we get to the areas where they are improving infrastructure. WestConnex is supposed to be a great improvement in connectivity for the west. When the original announcement was made, it looked pretty good. There was a $30-million plan to ease congestion around the WestConnex motorway and Parramatta that would reduce travel times for Parramatta workers and residents. We all know you cannot get onto WestConnex at the moment. You cannot get onto the M4; it is a car park. It always seems to go past Parramatta. To get into Parramatta you have to do a bit of a detour and go down some suburban roads, so you cannot really get in or out of Parramatta onto the M4. It is not particularly effective.

The state government announced when they announced WestConnex that they were going to build two new roads linking Parramatta to the M4 to encourage growth and would remove five sets of traffic lights for people getting out of Parramatta and onto the main freeway that passes us by. Then a couple of weeks later they said: 'Oops, made a mistake. That's not true. Sorry. Didn't mean it.' The announcement was huge and major. The withdrawal was much softer. They have basically left Parramatta off the WestConnex plan completely. We are the second CBD, have a huge economy—the capital of Western Sydney—and we are off the plan. Everybody in Parramatta knows that, no matter what they do to WestConnex, if you cannot actually get onto it, it is not much use.

Along the M4, of course, they have the Granville proposal, which is, I think, an additional 7,000 residences. I am not actually going to bet on that number. It was originally 20,000 residences in Granville between the train line and the freeway. I think it is down now to about 7,000. They have been pushed down by the community. But this is a traffic island. If you want to get out of that area between Granville station and the freeway—particularly Granville station and Parramatta road—you have to cross either the Bolt Street bridge, which is already a car park, or Parramatta Road. Anybody who has tried to cross Parramatta Road at two o'clock on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon knows that you do not try to do it at peak hour.

It means we will have thousands of primary school children living in this area without a primary school. They will have to cross Parramatta Road or Bold Street bridge to get to school in the morning in an area that is already so overcongested that the government has put Parramatta Road on its strategic plan. The traffic is so bad that they need to fix it, and the fix is to put an extra 200,000 residences on it, including 7,000 in Granville. It is just extraordinary. You will have more people trying to get onto WestConnex when there is no link to WestConnex. To get out of Granville you cross the Bold Street bridge or you cross Parramatta Road, and both of them are a disaster and will only get worse because of these plans.

And then, of course, we have the light rail project. It is a good project as far as it goes. It duplicates the heavy rail line into Strathfield. Some people criticised that. It goes from Westmead to Strathfield. It is not what councils wanted—councils wanted north-south lines and lines up to Castle Hill—but it does, according to the government, open up the area along that line, including for 10,000 more homes to be built at Camellia, which is currently a heavy industrial site. Let's close down the place where we have jobs and build a place where people live!

These are net job losers. Granville is a net job loser. Camellia is a net job loser. The North Parramatta heritage precinct is currently a hospital site where government departments have their offices. They are all closing, and we will end up with a little bit of extra retail. They are net job losers. The full-time, skilled jobs disappear and the part-time, casual jobs in hospitality and retail partially replace them. This is a folly.

Just to make things better, the state government is going to put a levy of around $20,000 a unit on any new apartment or residence that is built along that train line. In which other part of Sydney do individuals put their hand in their pocket and shell out that kind of money because the state government is building light rail? And the light rail network rips up the heavy rail to Carlingford for which the Labor government put money on the table to extend it to Epping. The state government gave it back. Now they are going to rip up the heavy line and put in light rail. It is quite extraordinary. On that light rail they are going to put thousands of new residences at Telopea as well. Those people will need to get on the light rail and go into Parramatta rather than going over Pennant Hills Road to the huge employment areas at Macquarie Park and Ryde.

Every plan the state government has is retrospective for the community of Parramatta, and I really think they should rethink on the whole and not in part. (Time expired)

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