Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I'd suggest the minister might like to visit Western Sydney and ask them about WestConnex. I'll tell you what it means. It means $8 to get your kids to the soccer, on the weekend, and it means $2,275 per year already in tolls, with a four per cent per year increase for 43 more years, above inflation. That's a four per cent increase every year for 43 years. Come out and talk to the people of Western Sydney about your great WestConnex project. We already had a road to the city and, quite frankly, we got one extra lane that then goes to three lanes and then goes to two lanes as you get towards the city. And we're going to pay thousands of dollars extra every year, in tolls, to get it.

We in Western Sydney live the experience of poor infrastructure investment by this government. We live it. We live it in Third World internet speeds in one of the great economies of the nation. We're the third-largest economy and we've got Third World internet speeds. We've got avoidable traffic congestion that causes people in Western Sydney to spend an hour or more additional time getting to work, every single day. We are already a population of 1.9 million. We're expected to grow to three million within the next 15 or so years. We will carry two-thirds of Sydney's population growth and we should expect, at this point, that investment in infrastructure will be going up not down. Instead, what we've got from this government across New South Wales is infrastructure plummeting by 70 per cent over the forward estimates, from $2.7 billion in 2017-18 to just $825 million in 2021-22, when we've got population growth carrying two-thirds of Sydney's population.

We are extraordinary in Western Sydney. I quite often say about our community that with the way the world's going, in terms of international trade, services and high-speed internet connection around the world, with people's work moving across borders, we are the place you want to be. We speak every language. We have people in our community who can navigate any city of the world without a map. We have cultural diversity. We know how to work in every single culture. We have many individuals in Western Sydney who are already exporting into China and India. But with the growing trade in services and these free trade agreements that this government spruiks so much we need the infrastructure in Western Sydney that allows us to benefit from the extraordinary community that we are.

For a start, we need decent fibre. When we designed the NBN it was a major infrastructure investment. This government has continued to invest, but it built something that is already essentially worthless. New Zealand has a gigabit economy and gigabit towns, like Singapore and countries to the north. We have Third World speeds, and countries around the world already have gigabit economies. If you put fibre in, you can expand to that, but copper cannot go faster. Copper is already at capacity. We cannot extend the capacity of fibre to the speeds we need with the 'fraudband' that this government has delivered over the last five years.

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