John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to commend my friend the member for Forde for calling for this important debate. The first point 'notes with concern the growing congestion in our major cities'. It will surprise very few people to know that I share this concern. My electorate of Bennelong has been at the epicentre of growth in Sydney, and we've been suffering for it. Back in 2015, the state government announced three urban activation precincts across the top of Bennelong—in Epping, Macquarie Park and North Ryde. Together, they would generate 13,000 new dwellings. Additionally, the boom in housing prices up to 2017 incentivised more growth in apartments, with thousands more dwellings going up in Gladesville, in Carlingford and especially in Meadowbank. Melrose Park has just seen manufacturing plants being removed and replaced with plans for another 10,000 homes. If you haven't been to Bennelong since 2012, you wouldn't recognise it.

Some of these developments are better than others. The initial three precincts are all built on train lines which have just been upgraded into Sydney's first metro line. The ability for this train to whisk people from their homes to interchanges at Chatswood and Epping is incredible, and when the full line opens up to the Sydney CBD in coming years we will have a world-class piece of infrastructure that will make a huge difference to our community. The new apartments at Meadowbank are also next to a train station, as well as being served by Sydney's ferries. It would be optimistic to suggest that everybody in these new apartments would catch public transport, no matter how close or frequent the service, so there will always be more to be done here. However, there are other developments that have no public transport at all and are purely a source of traffic congestion.

The new complexes at Gladesville provide no source of transport beyond driving down the heavily congested Victoria Road, already one of the most notorious roads in Sydney and only getting worse with more cars. Even worse, the homes in Melrose Park will be dependent on the new light rail from Parramatta to Homebush Bay, or the ferry wharf if they want to avoid Victoria Road. This would be fine except the wharf is yet to be built and there are reports that the light rail line will not go ahead at the present time. This is the antithesis of the planning we should be doing.

Our development is not just a function of transport infrastructure. Our growing suburbs need infrastructure of all sorts: schools, hospitals, parks, sporting facilities—and tennis courts. When they first announced the developments in Epping, there was no provision for extra schools because everybody knows that people in two-bedroom apartments don't have kids! Sense has prevailed, and the Berejiklian government has been commended for building new schools. They are building in Bennelong, where there is so much catching up to be done.

But back to congestion: Bennelong has five of the busiest roads in New South Wales, and, with many of them travelling through these previously mentioned growth suburbs, they are only getting to be more congested. We urgently need funds to retrofit solutions into our bulging suburbs, and the Urban Congestion Fund is one such mechanism for this. My electorate has been fortunate to get $3 million in this, to remove the bottleneck at Balaclava and Blaxland Road in Eastwood, which I was delighted to be able to announce with the minister for urban infrastructure, Alan Tudge. This is an excellent project, and I hope that we'll be able to get more projects like this approved locally.

That said, while this is a fantastic fund, it is essentially a bandaid. It will have a great effect in fixing some specific small-scale issues and bottlenecks, but what our cities need is planning. Our cities have never been master planned, nor has our settlement at large, and we can see the flaws that this has created every day. We need a plan of settlement, one that prioritises decentralisation facilitated by rapid transport options to our regions. Sydney and Melbourne are going to grow by millions in the next decades. These new residents won't find space in our existing suburbs. We need to incentivise movement to our nearby regions with transport that can initially make the commute easier and eventually be the conduit for business to these new centres gain economic independence of their own. Congestion is a real curse, but fixing this crisis presents us with the opportunity to improve the quality of life and our productivity.

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