Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

We do not have anything—not a dollar, as the member for Grayndler rightly points out. If you want to talk about job creation, having the M7 and the M9 rolled out will open up land between those two motorways, which will then transform economic opportunity in a legitimately fundamental way. The M7 itself, for example, has provided the opportunity to create the Sydney Business Park. They reckon that in this Western Sydney deal between 70,000 to 100,000 jobs will be created, when the reality is that I have a project right on our doorstep that is going to create 60,000 direct and indirect jobs over the next decade. That is what happens if you have good infrastructure in place.

The challenge I have got for the Turnbull government is: build a motorway without putting a toll on it; build a motorway that does not slug Western Sydney residents. Everyone knows congestion in Sydney is bad. I always love how people talk about the need to put in a congestion tax. Well, guess what? We have got one. They are called 'tolls'. In my area I have residents who pay $35 a day for the privilege of sitting on a congested M7, M2, M4 or M5. While the Baird government will say, 'We are doing all these projects; we've got NorthConnex, WestConnex and all these other things,' that is rubbish. These roads are always congested. They improve a bit and then they congest a bit more. Why? Because the minute people find that they can travel more easily on those roads they go from public transport to private transport and those roadways get clogged. The government does not invest jointly in private and public transport options to make people movement easier in Western Sydney. That is a problem as well.

The other problem I have got is people who advise this government. There is a whole bunch of self-servers who advise this government on transport. I was very heartened to see that today in the Financial Review Joe Aston rightly observed that the great Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue held a big infrastructure conference yesterday, to talk about Western Sydney, 40 kilometres from Western Sydney at a Sofitel hotel. Fantastic! They are talking about Western Sydney outside of the region. They probably made in the ballpark of $250,000 on it.

Back in the late nineties when the second airport decision was shelved, Chris Brown, former head of the Tourism Task Force, said: 'The people around the country and my members around the country are asking, "Why are we looking at a very Sydney-centric decision?" There are projects like rail, which might promote greater regional benefit—a greater the longer term benefit—than rushing in at breakneck speed to get another airport, a third airport, for Sydney.' This is Chris Brown in 1999, when everyone was complaining about the decision—well, people in the east were complaining about the decision—to shelve Badgerys Creek Airport. He then gets appointed to government bodies to look at the second airport for Sydney and then, once he is done with that, he sets up a group, the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue, that charges people money to go to a conference—and then he gets that money to generate further conferences and is able to influence the way decisions are made. I think that is wrong. I think there should be an ethical firewall between being appointed to a government body and being able to make money from that.

This is the thing: Chris Brown brings all of his contacts and he uses that to generate influence, particularly in my party, to try to get his decisions spruiked. When he gets that decision reinforced, he then goes and makes more money off it. He should not be known as Chris Brown; he should be known as China Brown, because he is the ultimate purveyor of soft power within our party, using all those funds to generate influence on projects that Western Sydney does not call for. This is the problem with infrastructure decisions in this debate: Western Sydney does not get the infrastructure it needs; it is given the infrastructure it does not want, that does not answer the longer term issues about what is required in our area. I am sick of having people in business positions and with powers of influence influencing various decision-makers when they do not live in the region, do not operate in the region, but make money off the region. As I said before, if the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue and its patrons live in Western Sydney and they are championing it—that is fine. But I will not have a dialogue that is run out of Balmain, pretending to be a Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue, influencing infrastructure decisions that get cheered on in this infrastructure statement and totally overlook the needs of the area.

As I said yesterday, I have never heard Chris Brown or the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue criticise the Baird government once for the Nepean Hospital being the most stressed hospital in the state. But when Mike Baird announces $500 million for Nepean Hospital, they are out there like the government's cheerleaders, cheering it on. This is the problem with infrastructure, particularly in Sydney: people in the east making decisions in the west, and ignoring the region together.

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