Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

An infrastructure disaster is developing in our community and it is called the WestConnex. What started out as a $10 billion motorway with plenty of promise has blown out to a $16.8 billion shemozzle that has resulted in the destruction of heritage homes and gardens and left many in our community outraged. Despite this project's massive cost, the planning surrounding its construction has left many people dumbfounded. Right now, if you drive to Sydney airport on any morning, you are guaranteed to get stuck in a traffic jam. The demand for Sydney airport continues to grow, as does the demand just down the road at Port Botany, the second largest container port in the country. We have residential towers springing up all around Mascot, 15 storeys high, and they continue to be built just north of the airport. At the moment, 100,000 motorists use the M5 East every day. If there is a breakdown in one of those lanes, it is chaos.

The WestConnex is going to make things worse in our community. It does not connect up to the second biggest container port in the country. How could you build a new motorway that drives straight past the second biggest container port in the country but does not connect to it? The St Peters interchange is projected to carry an additional 31,000 vehicles a day on local roads, creating a choke point on the corner of Bourke Road and Gardeners Road at Mascot. Anyone who goes down Gardeners Road now, near Botany Road, understands how congested it is, particularly on weekends. We are going to deposit an additional 31,000 people there, many of them in trucks, because that is the only way they can get back to the port—on local roads. It is a planning disaster.

At the same time, Sydney airport passenger numbers will double from 33 million in 2013 to 74 million in 2036, and Port Botany container movements are forecast to rise sixfold between 2011 and 2014. This spells disaster thanks to horrific planning of the motorway that does not even include a link to Foreshore Road and Botany Road.

The New South Wales government has refused to release the full details of the cost-benefit analysis. We called for it in December 2014 and February and October 2015. They only released it in November 2015, and it was an abridged version. It was released after the project was started and there is no value in that at all. One needs to ask what the government had to hide in releasing that so late. Thankfully, the Australian National Audit Office is now conducting a thorough audit into WestConnex. WestConnex is looming as a planning disaster for my community and surrounding communities.