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

My community of Parramatta and the surrounding areas is undergoing great change. If you read the newspapers in the Sydney-wide press, or you talk to people who do not live in the area, they will talk to you about the extraordinary change in Parramatta. It is almost like picking up Chatswood, which is glass high-rises, and dumping it on Parramatta—and what a good thing that is. Well, so they say. Who wouldn't say it is a good thing?

When you approach Parramatta you see cranes in the sky; you see high-rises just growing into the air—incredible activity in the Parramatta area. But, when you live there and you talk to local people, there is a sense of unease that is growing. In many ways it feels like a lack of power to affect what is happening in our community, an inability to voice their concerns, a lack of transparency. Part of that draws from the fact that we are one of the areas that has had our councils abolished. There are two new councils: one is Parramatta and the other one is Cumberland. At the moment, we have no democratically elected representatives, and I would say quite openly that there are some things that are happening in both areas that simply would not have happened if we still have elected councils.

When you talk to people you get this sense of frustration at a lack of consultation, a sense of a lack of power to influence decisions that are being made and a sense that the decisions are being made elsewhere by people who actually do not know who we are. Not all of the decisions makes sense. Even people that are really quite pro-growth and want to see Parramatta move ahead incredibly quickly still have a sense of unease about how these decisions are being made.

I want to use the time that I have today to talk about my community and exactly who we are. We are a community with an extraordinary sense of place. You do not say you live in Sydney, if you live in Parramatta or its surroundings; you say you live in Parramatta. You only have to live there a couple of months to get a sense that you are in a place that is very special. It gets under your skin really quickly, and it is hard to know why that is.

It is worth noting that it was the gathering place for the Indigenous tribes right up to the Hawkesbury, right up to the Blue Mountains—they all came to Parramatta for their meetings. They also sensed that it was a special place. It is an extraordinary place in many ways. Whether it is Toongabbie, Dundas, Harris Park or Mays Hill or Granville, it is a place of great diversity and great history.

Paul Keating once described a politician—I will not say who—as 'all tip and no berg'. Those of us who know Parramatta really well know that, while we have tip, that is nothing compared to the size and scale and capacity that sits slightly out of view. There is a level of energy that is in the community, and you have to know the community really well to see it. I am going to talk bit about that.

For a start we have an extraordinary collection of assets. We have more heritage assets than The Rocks. There is the first female convict factory, designed by Francis Greenway, and the Roman Catholic orphanage, where the children of the first convicts were kept, that later became the mechanical institute for girls and then the Parramatta Girls Home. With the convict factory, there is a continuous history of women's imprisonment from modern settlement right up to the last decade.

All that you learned in primary school happened in Parramatta, from the Rum Corps to Macquarie. It was all there. We had Pemulwuy, one of the great Indigenous warriors, who rampaged through Merrylands so effectively that people thought he could not be killed. We had Samuel Marsden visit with his 18 Maori chiefs and stroll through the streets of Parramatta town. They left their 18 children in the colony as a symbol of good faith. They all died of smallpox and are buried on the riverbank in Parramatta.

We have Elizabeth Macarthur farm. We had the Battle of Vinegar Hill, where the Irish were going to attack the soldiers but accidently got drunk and blew it—as they do. We have the girls orphanage on the banks of the Parramatta River. It is an extraordinary collection of heritage assets, and you only have to dig at tiny bit on any new development and you will find Indigenous artefacts that date back tens of thousands of years.

Parramatta River is the principal tributary of Sydney Harbour. You can get on a boat in Sydney Harbour and you can go all the way up the Parramatta River to the Parramatta ferry. You cannot get the extra couple of kilometres anymore because of weirs on the confluence of Darling Mills Creek and Toongabbie Creek, where the river begins. But that is the spot where Governor Phillip landed and walked down the banks of the Parramatta River—and the Phillip diaries are actually a record of his walk. Then he got to The Crescent, where the Indigenous people had their principal meeting place, and picked that as the site for Government House, which is still there today, in the oldest gazetted national park in the world, known as Parramatta Park. It is an extraordinary place. We have amazing green space in Parramatta Park, which I just mentioned, but also Lake Parramatta, which was the colony's first dam and provided the water supply for the colony. If you start walking from there up Darling Mills Creek, you can walk all the way to the Hawkesbury in not that long a time. You can do it in less than a day. So we have these incredible natural and heritage assets in our region. There are 30 creeks that flow through the region, and, while in the early days we built our cities with our backs to them, they are still essentially there.

We have some fantastic strip shopping centres. If you want butchers and greengrocers, you cannot beat Merrylands, Guildford and Harris Park. Some of those little strip shopping centres have five or six butchers and three or four fruit shops, and you can get food from all around the world right there. We potentially have, if someone chooses to take it up, the best foodie train around. You would get off at Auburn for the Turkish and Middle Eastern food, then at Granville for Lebanese and Nepalese food and then at Harris Park for food from all the regions of India—there are Gujurati and Telugu restaurants. You used to have to go all the way to Pendle Hill for a Telugu chilli bhaji, but now you can get them in Telugu restaurants in Harris Park. You would go to Merrylands for Afghani food, to Guildford for African and to Cabramatta for Vietnamese. You would be out of my electorate by then, but the food that is available along that train line is just waiting for someone to package it and turn it into a viable business model that generates business in those areas. Western Sydney is actually one of Australia's biggest food producers. You would not know it unless you looked for it, but we have yoghurt makers and a lot of halal food producers. We also have people who make idli batter and dosa batter for the local communities. It is wide open for export—there is incredible food capacity in Western Sydney waiting to be expanded.

We speak every language. We have a knowledge of the world in us that is quite extraordinary. If you want to build a business that targets Asia or the Middle East or Africa, we have highly skilled, highly qualified people who are bilingual and trilingual—and, in some cases, speak six languages. We have people who have concepts in their minds that they can express in one language and not others because they have this capacity to see the world from a range of perspectives. We are seeing the research now that diversity increases profit—well, we have it. We really do have it all.

We also have some incredibly high tech companies in some of our warehouse areas. We have Thales, one of the best companies in Australia for innovation, just up the road, but there are a whole stack of others, too, that sit in some of our warehouse districts. If you did not know it was there, you would miss the company that does—or used to do—the Toyota bumper bar on its CAD/CAM. We have really quite great companies and an incredible workforce that, in many cases, has to leave Parramatta and go into the city to work. We have the Western Sydney University, with all of its cultural studies and its amazing collection of professors and academic staff. If you are looking for people who really explore cultural diversity, they are there. If you are looking for people who understand innovation in the modern context, they are there.

So we have this amazing capacity within our community, which I fear we may lose if the planning of this rapid change in Parramatta is not very carefully done—and I fear that it is not being carefully done. One of the issues about Parramatta which is perhaps most frustrating for us all is that, perhaps because we do not all work and live in the same suburb anymore, it can be very difficult for us to see each other. Many of us get on trains in the morning and are whisked off to far-flung places, so you do not necessarily get to see the great wealth that is there. I am very lucky; I do see it because I get invited, but many of us do not. There is, in many ways, a lack of fertile ground for really good ideas to fall on. When I meet an extraordinary young entrepreneur, one of the most important things I quite often do is just introduce them to others, because they cannot see each other in this community that we have. There is the sense that, while the capacity is there, we have a long way to go to actually harness it in the way we need to.

One of the things that we are seeing about the development that is of big concern to me in terms of that capacity is the gradual rezoning of some of the areas that contain the older warehouse-style buildings where local businesses actually grow. Great cities of the world are putting aside areas that cannot be residential, areas where the old warehouses are, because they are the places where new technology companies and local businesses grow and first appear. In Parramatta we are seeing those old areas being demolished, quite often for residential development. We are losing areas where people work and, instead, we are seeing high-rise residential go in. They are actually job losing, except for retail jobs, which quite often are casual and less skilled. We are losing skilled and semi-skilled jobs and we are getting, in many cases, a lower number of retail jobs, and if we do not start preserving the kinds of buildings and the kind of accommodation that new and young and innovative businesses can afford to rent we will quite quickly lose our capacity to grow our local businesses.

It is great when big business moves in. It is terrific. We have had Deloitte move in. PwC is moving in. We have fantastic big companies buying some of the commercial properties in Parramatta so those big companies can come in. That is fantastic, but for our long-term prosperity we also need to grow our own local businesses using the extraordinary diversity and strength that we have. Major redevelopments in the current Granville industrial precinct will see essentially all of that go and become residential. The Camellia precinct, which is where the Shell refinery was, but which has also had some other very large businesses, is going residential as well. The heritage precinct in North Parramatta, which contains over 70 heritage buildings, is now segmented for sale for residential development.

There is a concern that, while high-rise residential is a good short-term bang, it alone will not lead Parramatta to grow into a great city in the way that it could. Great cities are places where you live, not just where you sleep, and we are not just losing the areas where local businesses can grow and develop, we are also losing other things as well, such as our riverbank and our amenities. We are a river city. Traditionally, river cities start fairly low on the riverbanks and then go up so that the community can actually enjoy the amenity of the riverbank. If you go into the Parramatta council's chambers now and look at the big buildings that are planned, we have some very high buildings on the riverbank. We have one that is over 60 storeys. It is just topping out now. On the riverbank, you can go to 60 storeys, but we have had commercial premises in the heart of the CBD, just three or four blocks away in the city, that have been restricted to 20 storeys. In the city you cannot go high, but on the riverbank, which should belong to us all, we are seeing quite high developments, which I doubt anybody thinks is a good idea. We always assumed that our access to the riverbanks was permanent. We are finding further down the river that we are getting eight-storey buildings almost like a wall on either side of the river, so our amenity is disappearing.

We always expected the heritage precinct, which I mentioned before, which is now being carved up for sale, would be a major community asset. Parts of it are being preserved for later sale when the government decides what to do with those heritage buildings. However, for many of us it has always been the case that you decide what to do with the heritage buildings first—you make it work for the community, and then you decide what you do around it. For us, it is backwards to say: we are going to go residential first and we will make a decision on its use later.

We have an Olympic-standard swimming pool in the heart of the CBD of Parramatta until 31 March. Then the state government is going to demolish it to build the biggest stadium. It is currently on park trust land. It was built by the people of Parramatta back in the fifties. It is a war memorial pool. It has one of two Olympic diving towers in Sydney. It has a water polo pool. It has 10 lanes so that if you want to conduct a swimming carnival you can compete over eight lanes and warm up over two. Just a few years ago, the Parramatta council spent over $7 million refurbishing it because they assumed it would continue to be there. It is a great city asset. The state government decided to abolish it. Again, we have no elected council to oppose that. There is no commitment to rebuilding it. It is one of at least three pools in the region that are now under threat. It teaches 1,300 people to swim. On a hot day there are 1,500 people that go there. There are all sorts of reasons why you would not do this. The community does not want it, they did not consult on it and yet they are doing it, at a time when the community has no power. I have been swimming in that pool since it had cold outdoor showers in winter—as many have—and I will go for my last swim there on 31 March. I will see a great community asset taken from us by a government that did not ask, did not consult and does not care what we think.

We have a new light rail project coming in, and none of us are going to complain about the fact that we are getting a new light rail project. Some of us would complain that it rips up a heavy rail line that could potentially go through to Epping. It essentially wipes out that option. By ripping up that heavy line to Carlingford and going light rail from Carlingford, the option of us actually having a link through to the major employment hubs at Macquarie Park, Macquarie University and Epping—the opportunity for people in Parramatta and people in those regions to commute backwards and forwards between the two employment hubs—will go. We will end up with light rail that, rather than going down to Clyde so that people in Carlingford can get a faster train to the city, will go all the way into Parramatta and stop two blocks from Parramatta station. It is slower.

There are some really good things about the light rail, but one would have to question a state government that rips up the opportunity for heavy rail between major employment hubs and instead builds a light rail into the CBD for a suburb that is a few kilometres from the CBD. We question that. It was not what the local community wanted. The local community wanted light rail to Castle Hill. They wanted light rail cross-city—not into the city but across the western suburbs so that people could get to other sections, so that you could get to Bankstown, so that people in Bankstown could get to Parramatta, so that people in Epping could get to Parramatta, so that people in the suburbs surrounding Parramatta could get to the work hubs of Macquarie Park, in that quite dense area up there, and up to Norwest, also a major employment centre. Instead, we have a light rail that we are told is the first part of a bigger project which will eventually link through to Strathfield, running parallel to the current heavy rail. It seems very much that this is a light rail project that serves a new area of development but does not do a great deal for the people who are already struggling with a lack of public transport options. It does not do a great deal at all.

We are also concerned about the increasing loss of our local services in the community. We lost the Police Citizens Youth Club a few months ago. The Salvation Army sold its premises a few months ago. When your state body has offered $30 million-plus for your city site, it is very hard for you to say no. While we are the second CBD in Sydney, we would say we are quite a separate CBD. We are in one of the biggest economies in Australia and we have the second-highest number of homeless people of any area in Australia every night. We are starting to lose the services that we need in a CBD like ours to serve the most vulnerable. We are very worried that, as those land prices go up, we will lose more and more of those services. We are very lucky that Parramatta Mission are staying put. They have made plans to stay exactly where they are. They are a major feeder of and service for the homeless. We fear that we will lose many others.

In summary, I hope I have outlined what an extraordinary community we are and how we need far more input into the decisions that are being made at the moment. Without a locally elected council, at a time when two councils have administrators and there is no democratic process at all, the state government is making decisions that I firmly believe they would not be able to make if our councils were in fear of their positions—and they would be.

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