Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to support the proposed relocation of Jandakot Airport in Western Australia. Jandakot Airport is the busiest general aviation airport in this country. It is located in the seat of Tangney; however, it is right on the border of the seat of Canning. Just to give you an indication of how busy it is, at a school graduation in December last year as the students were being presented with their certificates they had to stop on a regular basis because of the planes flying over doing their circuit training late in the evening.

The relocation of Jandakot Airport to a location in the Shire of Murray, which is within the Canning electorate, is something that I support very much. The fact that the Jandakot Airport is the busiest general aviation airport in Australia means that within two years it will have reached saturation point in terms of movements. Flyover noise and nuisance are having a big impact on the local residents. The local shires and cities—the City of Cockburn, the City of Canning and the City of Melville—have all made submissions about the impact that the Jandakot Airport is having on their local area.

In this place several years ago, when discussing the master plan for Perth Airport, the member for Perth, Stephen Smith, quite rightly pointed out that in Western Australia, if we wanted to design the worst possible configuration for airports, we could not have done better than what we have at the moment. We have Perth Airport, not too far away is RAAF Base Pearce and to the south of that is Jandakot Airport. They all impose on each other’s airspace. They overlap to the extent that international airlines, such as Singapore et cetera, fly over the flight space of Jandakot to get to Perth Airport. It is well managed but it is not an ideal situation.

We have seen at Jandakot an impact on housing because of the increased movements. Previously, an aerial water bomber could not get off the ground and crashed into a local house, so there are those sorts of impacts. I support the fact that the relocation will bring to the Peel region an enormous amount of aviation related industry, which will bring jobs to that area. If the state government, which I understand has some sympathy for this move, gets behind this along with the federal government, this move can only be a positive not only for aviation in Western Australia but for jobs and for safety, and I think the people in my region will be very pleased to see its location in the Murray Shire.