Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday I attended a New South Wales state government Planning Assessment Commission hearing, at Bankstown Golf Club, into the Moorebank intermodal terminal. One thing that was very disappointing was that at this hearing they did not allow any audio recordings. If we are to have full transparency in our government, we must allow the media, or anyone, to have audio recordings of these hearings. Therefore I would like to take this opportunity to put on the record what I said at that meeting, and that was: if this Moorebank intermodal project is to go ahead, the Planning Assessment Commission must put on it the condition that any locomotive that goes to that intermodal out in Western Sydney at Liverpool must have the same tier 4 pollution standards as trucks.

We have a serious issue with particulate pollution out in Western Sydney. In the year 2008, it was estimated that 522 people lost their lives—died—because of particulate air pollution in Western Sydney. As to the plan to take trucks off the road and instead put those containers on locomotives: every container that we do that to will add to the particulate pollution—not by 10 per cent, not by 20 per cent, but by over 1,000 per cent. We cannot increase the particulate pollution in Western Sydney when already 522 people are dying every year.