Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

They do talk about housing issues. It does talk about issues, but not enough about Western Sydney. But David Borger managed to get a piece into The Sydney Morning Herald this week, talking about Liverpool as the escape route for frustrated commuters. Apparently it took David Borger to see a Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics study that showed that congestion was a big issue in Western Sydney. I do credit him for the fact that he does live in Western Sydney, but this has been a big issue for some time. And there are problems with thinking that Liverpool, for example, will suddenly open up as a potential new part of Western Sydney that will provide people with the ability to get jobs close to where they live and affect housing affordability in the longer term.

In a lot of the CBDs in Western Sydney—Liverpool, Parramatta, Blacktown, Penrith and Richmond—we are forcing modern living on colonial grids that do not suit the times. It is too hard to move around these CBDs. In fact, I often say, 'If you're upset with a friend, force them to drive to Parramatta.' Any time you have to go into Parramatta is an exercise in self-loathing if you're using a car. I love the city, but it is near impossible to move around in. The same will be experienced in Liverpool. David Borger knows this because he relates it in in his story. This is the same David Borger, mind you, who, when I raised the opportunity for south-west growth centres to have a rival CBD within Sydney, described that as the stupidest idea he had heard. That was David Borger.

What was his option? His option was not to put a new CBD area in the south-west growth centre. He thinks revitalising Liverpool will be the saviour—that it will open up new jobs and ensure that people can move more easily across Sydney. But there is all the money that then has to be devoted to the acquisition of property in the Liverpool CBD and the re-routing of traffic within the Liverpool CBD. Why couldn't that be better used for other things in that area, one might ask.

Again, we need to have a much more far-sighted view about what happens in Western Sydney than we see in some of the propositions being put forward by some of the self-proclaimed voices of Western Sydney. We need to actually improve people movement, and, connected to that, housing affordability. But we have these types of people like David Borger, who manage to get one or two pieces published to assuage the conscience of The Sydney Morning Herald, which thinks it doesn't focus enough on Western Sydney—which it doesn't. This not good enough. Some of the people who push these ideas—from David Borger to Chris Brown—certainly do not represent Western Sydney, and their comments should not be taken as gospel on issues such as housing affordability and people movement in our area.

Big projects are going begging. There is the upgrade of the Western Sydney line, the M9, which needs to happen much faster than is occurring right now. Not enough money has been dedicated to this to connect Western Sydney to the Illawarra and open up new paths of transport and people movement, that, in time, would help people who are stuck out on the urban fringe. Those people have had to pursue cheaper housing lots in Western Sydney, out on the urban fringe, because that's the cheapest they can get. But the infrastructure is not there. This is not good enough anymore.

Again, things need to happen: the M9; a public transport plan for Western Sydney that will help actually alleviate the types of pressures being experienced by commuters from Penrith through to Blacktown; and investment in the train stations themselves so people can actually park their cars close to a train station and get onto public transport instead of being stuck on the roads. These are other thing that will help the people living on the fringes of the city with people movement and, again, with improving housing affordability. This needs a lot more than one or two op-eds in a Sydney newspaper. It requires genuine commitment from all levels of government, and business, to ensure that this becomes a reality.

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