Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak about infrastructure, which impacts on my electorate in multiple ways. In the Hawkesbury, a region long ignored by the Liberals, we need to see a pointless Windsor Bridge replacement project stopped and for the New South Wales government to see sense and plan and construct a third crossing for the Hawkesbury River. My Blue Mountains residents are also facing the ridiculous situation of trains being built for our rail lines by the Baird government that are too long and too wide for our stations and tunnels, as revealed by the New South Wales member for Blue Mountains, Trish Doyle. We also face a slow drive on the M4 as we commute, morning and night, squinting into the sun in both directions.

But, without doubt, the biggest concern on infrastructure in my electorate is the plan for Western Sydney Airport. As opposition leader Bill Shorten said of the government last week:

They have made a mess of the process of Badgerys Creek by ignoring the locals instead of including them.

He is right. At every step of this process the community has been ignored, and no last-minute invitation from the Minister for the Environment and Energy to speak briefly with local environmentalists and residents is going to change the year of running from the community that preceded it. He did not even conduct the meeting on his own but had the Minister for Urban Infrastructure by his side, ready to defend the project rather than delve into the detail of the issues.

The government's inadequate response to the Western Sydney Airport environmental impact statement for Badgerys Creek Airport shows the lengths it will go to to get this airport happening, regardless of its impact on the environment and the quality of life of Blue Mountains and Western Sydney residents. On 15 September 2016 the final EIS was published. It is a mammoth project, it is worth billions of dollars, and the environment minister took just 58 days to have his department analyse the thousands of pages of the EIS, advise him and deliver a considered verdict. We do not know how good a job the final EIS did of responding to the issues raised by my community, because my request to make those submissions public was refused. So I remain firmly of the view that the government's approval process does not meet the test supported by the Labor caucus: that the planning be right, including rail, from day one; that it be a creator of good jobs for Western Sydney residents; that the community have their say; and that there is a proper environmental assessment process. These criteria have not been met.

Let's start with the need for a proper environmental assessment process. There have been 41 conditions put on this project. They have been kindly described to me by one Blue Mountains resident as 'complete fluff'. The approvals push every serious study into the future. The conditions that have been approved for an airport at Badgerys Creek based on indicative flights confirm that the lower Blue Mountains will be subjected to disruptive aircraft noise 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with no protections guaranteed; unlike residents of the eastern suburbs, the inner west and the North Shore affected by Kingsford Smith Airport, residents of the western suburbs and the Blue Mountains will not have the protection of a curfew or hourly flight caps.

The approval conditions released by the Minister for the Environment give the go-ahead to the airport despite the government's failure to include comprehensive noise plans in the final EIS. This breaks their own promise. On May 6, 2016 the Minister for Urban Infrastructure said:

Allocating the flight paths to minimise the individual impact on any one point will form part of a comprehensive noise mitigation plan to be contained in the final EIS.

The EIS does not contain those plans; that promise has been broken. The environment minister has approved an airport without knowing what the flight paths will be and what the noise impacts on communities, schools and individuals will be.

And not only has the coalition government failed to provide comprehensive noise mitigation, but the approvals conditions give no certainty that the commitment to use head-to-head operations overnight to reduce night-time noise for residential areas will actually occur. This commitment was made by Labor originally, and I described it at the time as a step in the right direction to recognise the noise impacts on homes under the flight path. The approvals document merely says that the flight path design should 'minimise, to the extent practicable, the impact of overnight flights over residential and wilderness areas'. That is hardly an ironclad promise. Even if the head to head take-offs and landings to the south-west do occur, the best estimate seems to be that it could only happen 80 per cent of the time. That is 73 nights a year when it will not happen—or more than two months a year. My community has a range of views—from 'No airport ever' to 'Won't it be nice to be close when we go on holidays'—but the common element is the belief that we should be able to sleep at night, in peace, as much as anybody else in Sydney can.

To give you an idea of the level of noise we will experience from overnight flights, I took my decibel meter with me into the House today at question time. If the estimates are right, a flight's noise over our homes would peak at about the same volume as the Minister for the Environment, in full swing, answering a question—hopefully, though, for less than three minutes! They do not have to put up with that in Lindfield in the middle of the night—and nor should anyone have to—because they get a curfew from 11 pm to 6 am. Others would say that there were already aircraft using Mascot at night even with a curfew. We get that. The rules say that small propeller-driven aircraft, low-noise jets that meet weight and noise requirements, and a limited number of freight aircraft can operate at night. This allows movement of time-critical freight, including mail and fresh food. A small number of international passenger-jet movements can be approved during the shoulder period between 5 am and 6 am—and, of course, emergency flights can come and go. But during the curfew aircraft must operate over Botany Bay, so there are still protections. That all seems very reasonable. So if there has to be an airport, give us the same rules. It would, at least, be fair.

You will have to forgive us as a community for being cynical about any commitments made by this government. They are either deliberately misleading us or are simply incompetent. Let me explain. In spite of decisions being made without flight paths finalised, the Western Sydney Airport website helpfully provides us with a noise modelling tool. This noise modelling tool is the department's own tool designed to help us residents understand what is being proposed. You punch in your address and it tells you the number of flights you will face and at what height. What that tool tells me is that if my child goes to Blaxland East Public School, which nestles in a quiet bush neighbourhood, the school, homes and neighbours will receive by 2030 up to 75 flights over it in the day time, 20 more in the evening and up to 30 overnight, at less than 6,000 feet.

That information does not match with the promises the minister has made. So which information is right? Do we believe the information we are being given? How can we believe the information we are being given? Is it any wonder that our view is that the commercial imperatives and profitability of airlines and the airport operator will go ahead of the best interests of our community?

As an aside, I draw people's attention to Infrastructure Australia analysis, which identifies a number of potential limitations which could present risks to achieving the estimated economic benefits of the airport, including inconsistencies in the economic appraisal methodology. But the basic facts are: if it is good enough for the rest of Sydney to be given protections through things like caps and curfews then it is good enough for the Blue Mountains and Western Sydney, and if it is good enough for the minister's own electorate on Sydney's North Shore to be spared from aircraft noise at night by curfew then it is good enough for us, at roughly the same distance and with aircraft at roughly the same height. Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains residents should not be treated as second-class citizens and collateral damage of big business and the coalition government.

What we are left with now is an approval for an airport where we do not know what the flight paths will be, what the noise impacts will be, what the biodiversity management will be, what the exact impacts on our world heritage national park are, what the air quality impacts really are, when the fuel lines might be built and how the electricity grid relocation will work. They basically gave the airport the go-ahead on the proviso that the site developer comes up with plans for these things. Every single major study is pushed into the future and most are likely to occur after contracts have been signed. What happens if those studies do not stack up? While the government may not have a plan for that, my community does. Anyone who decides to build this airport, whether its the operators of Sydney Airport or another consortium, needs to know that the one thing they will not get from our community is silence. We will not be silent when we see an unfair plan. We will not be silent when we see a poor process and we will not be silent about something that is bad for our community—not now and not ever.

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