Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is great to stand here and speak on the address-in-reply to the Governor-General's address to open the new parliament after the last election. I will start by saying it is always a privilege for any person in these chambers to represent their community. I certainly feel that way, and every day I have gratitude for the fact that my community gave me the honour of representing us down in this place. I would certainly say that I—like many other people—regard myself, very much, first and foremost, as a representative of my community and a representative of my community's values and beliefs, and, very much secondly, a member of a political party. That is how I treat my position and will always do so.

After the 2013 election, I gave a bird's-eye tour of the electorate of Page for people who were not familiar with the geography of it. I took us on a full bird's-eye view, flying from north to south and east to west. I will not do that today but I thought it was a very picturesque and very colourful tour. Again, there have been some changes to the boundaries between those two elections, and I would certainly like to acknowledge that the northern part of my electorate does touch on the Queensland border. I did say, in my first address to this place, that if you were on the Queensland-New South Wales border and were flying south over Page, that that would be the right way to be flying. My Queensland friends did not seem to agree with that.

The community of Woodenbong is one of the first communities you would come to. I was there last week. Wonderful cattle grazing country there, Deputy Speaker Buchholz. Have you ever been up there? I encourage you to come. It is a beautiful part of the country. If you are to fly south from Woodenbong, you would come to places like Kyogle—a beautiful community. If you veered west there, you would be flying towards Lismore. Lismore is probably the critical mass of the region. It has the local base hospital, a lot of education facilities and is one of the biggest places in the area.

With the redistribution, I was fortunate enough to take in some of the northern villages around Lismore that were not previously in Page like Nimbin. You would have heard of Nimbin, Deputy Speaker. It has been a forerunner in many things like permaculture. It was obviously the home of the Aquarius Festival back in the early seventies. I go out there, and it is always an interesting time when I am in Nimbin—a very colourful community. In the coastal east, I used to represent Ballina. I am very disappointed that Ballina got taken out of the electorate. I now come into the coast just south of Ballina.

If you go down the coast, you take in places like Evans Head. The further south you go you run into the wonderful mighty Clarence River. Yamba and Iluca are on the mouth of the Clarence river. The boundary used to stop there. I now have the great fortune of continuing south and taking the northern beaches of Coffs Harbour and places like Woolgoolga, Corindi, Red Rock, Sandy Beach and right down to Sapphire Beach as the most southern place. That is certainly a beautiful part of the world. There is not only wonderful industry and great tourism industry in that part of the world but also a thriving blueberry industry. Around the Coffs region was historically a banana growing area. It has a wonderful representation of the Sikh community. The Sikhs settled in that part of the world many decades ago and there is a very healthy and vibrant Sikh community, which adds a lot to the community down there. They are very active now in the blueberry industry. A lot of them have switched from bananas. That is a new area, but also all the communities in between. The whole of the Clarence Valley Council area is within Page and, obviously, the major centre of Grafton. Centres like Maclean as well have come into the electorate.

Ken O'Dowd (Flynn, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tell them about your two cows.

Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am glad the member for Flynn, who lives near Rockhampton, is here because I am getting to Casino. The Clarence Valley is a wonderful part of the world as well. As I go back further north, we get to the Richmond Valley and come to the beef capital of this country, Casino. The member for Flynn is very jealous of Casino. He is very jealous of Casino for a number of reasons. He is very jealous of the premier cattle in the country we produce. He is very jealous of our meatworks—a wonderful meatworks—which employs over 1,000 people, so that is not to be sneezed at. It is the biggest private employer in our region. He is going to be very jealous of our saleyards too, because one of the projects that I have committed to under one of the Stronger Regions Fund rounds was a redevelopment of the saleyards, the livestock exchange in Casino. A $3½ million dollar investment from the federal government has been matched by the council. That is going to be a wonderful, pre-eminent livestock exchange within the country.

The member has really interrupted me, and it has distracted me, so, while I have gone to that, let us go with the others. There are some other things that we, as a federal government, are looking to deliver for the community in the electorate in that same round of the Stronger Regions Fund. At Ballina there is the marine rescue tower. It has already open, though not officially. The old tower was falling down. The new one is wonderful for the fishing and tourism elements of Ballina. That has been constructed. In Lismore, we are also building the new Lismore Quadrangle, which is going to include a new art gallery. Again, all of these are about job creation and extra commerce. This is going to bring a whole new type of tourist and visitor to the town. That was another commitment we made through the Stronger Regions Fund. Up around Kyogle, at Woodenbong, there is a beautiful dam called Toonumbar Dam. If you come up I will show you where it is, Deputy Speaker. We gave $1 million to reseal the road out there. It is a very popular tourist destination. Then, going back down to the Clarence, which I was talking about earlier, the Harwood sugar mill is a very important employer in the region, and the sugar industry is very important to the lower Clarence. We also gave a commitment there to redevelop and help their logistics.

While I am on that, let us talk about some of the other exciting projects that are going to be happening in my electorate over the next two or three years. First and foremost is one of the biggest regional infrastructure projects in the country, and that is the upgrade of the Pacific Highway. A lot of the remaining sector is south of Ballina, to Woolgoolga. It is about 165 kilometres, and for a lot of that the dual duplication is still to happen. We do the dual duplication for a number of reasons. The first and foremost reason is the decrease in fatalities. The fatalities on the Pacific Highway are now actually at a multidecade low. When you consider the increased traffic that is on that road, that is a wonderful achievement. The achievement has happened because of the dual duplication, and fatalities will fall even further as the section between Woolgoolga and Ballina is finished.

There are some amazing engineering feats as part of this upgrade, including massive rivers to cross, and wetlands and soggy or very soft soils to navigate. At Harwood, which I mentioned earlier—where the sugar mill is—the bridge at the Clarence River is going to look a bit like the gateway bridge. I am sure you have seen that, Deputy Speaker. It is almost a $250 million investment to get over the Clarence River. This is a big engineering feat. At its peak it will probably be employing around 3½ thousand people in that region. That is direct jobs, so when you add in indirect jobs we are talking 6,000 to 7,000 jobs being directly or indirectly created because of that piece of infrastructure. It is going to be wonderful. It is wonderful while it is being built, because of the economic boosts that it brings to our region, and, obviously, post-completion it is going to be great for the economic viability of our region. Transport is going to be much easier, especially for tourism, for example. When the dual duplication got as far south as near Byron Bay, suddenly the tourism influx to our region from Queensland and the Gold Coast exponentiated because people could drive there much more easily. It is going to open up the whole area not just for tourism but for transport and a whole lot of different industries, and there will be a whole lot of benefits from that. It is a very exciting time.

Obviously, like the of rest of the country, I know the NBN is rolling out in 2020. Most of Page will be connected by around this time next year. Wireless has already arrived, which has been a boon to the little villages, but the major centres will be getting fibre-to-the-node in the next 12 to 18 months, which is very exciting.

But there is more to come. With the investments that we make in our region, we are always looking for things that can create jobs and commerce and make our towns more vibrant. There were some very exciting investments that we announced during the campaign and that we will be delivering over the next number of years. There is one at Maclean. Maclean is the Scottish capital of Australia. All the Stobie poles—no, I should not call them 'Stobie poles'; I am giving away my heritage—all the telegraph poles have Scottish tartans on them from the families that settled around the region. It really is a beautiful, picturesque town on the Clarence River, and we are going to give nearly $2 million for the riverside precinct upgrade. That is about turning the town around to face the river again—there are going to be promenades, boardwalks and things where boats can pull in as well, to open that up. It will really help the tourism potential and growth of Maclean and, indeed, the lower Clarence. The old Woolgoolga Surf Life Saving Club is not really up to scratch, so we are going to build a new one, to be built where the marine rescue tower is at Woolgoolga; they will have a new site there. We all know the great work that the Woolgoolga Surf Life Saving Club does, and it is going to be great to deliver on that.

Casino had an old drill hall that was moved there many, many decades ago, and a lot of people who had been preparing to go to war or who were with the Army Reserve or had anything to do with the defence forces had a very emotional attachment to the Casino drill hall. A couple of years ago the defence department decided that the hall was surplus to requirements as it was not being used anymore, and they decided to sell it. Members of the community came to see me and said they thought it was a very important historical and cultural part of the town, and they asked me if they could get the Defence Force not to sell it and to keep it in community hands. It was great to work with the then Minister for Defence and the local council on that. It was a great day when we transferred the ownership of that real estate and that hall to council at a very good price a number of years ago, and now a committee and a group have been formed and we are going to turn the drill hall into a military museum. I also gave some money to redevelop some of the grounds around that with an amphitheatre, and there are some very exciting things happening in what is now going to be a very well-used public space.

There are lots more, and I will not go into them all, but they include upgrades to tennis courts at Wooli. Rushforth Park in Grafton is going to get a bit of an upgrade, as is the Woodburn-Evans Head Golf Club. These are very exciting times for Woodburn and, indeed, Broadwater and Wardell and all those places along the current route of the Pacific Highway, because they are beautiful villages on the Richmond River, but they have the Pacific Highway literally teeming straight through the middle of them. With the upgrade, the highway will not be going through these villages and will be a little bit behind them, so these places will become destination points for tourism. The visitors to these places will be different visitors, but they will still come because of the absolutely picturesque places that these villages are. We also gave some money to the Richmond Valley Council to do some pontoons and stuff at Woodburn. Kyogle has an aquatic centre with a great swimming pool set up, and we have given them some money to upgrade that.

There was also a great tragedy in our community around 10 years ago—in fact, it was 10 years ago late last year—when four young men from our community were all killed in one car crash. They were all in the same car, and all were basically from the Lismore region. Our community has been grieving over that issue and is still grieving, so the 10th anniversary last year was very sad for a lot of the people involved. I do not think there was anyone in the region who did not know the boys or know someone who knew those boys or who was associated with those boys very closely. The family and a group have been trying to develop what is called Southern Cross LADS, a driver training facility just out of Lismore. Some of the rules in New South Wales have actually changed because of that accident. The number of people that learner drivers or P-platers can have in their car after a certain hour at night changed because of this accident, and the number of hours that you have to drive as a P-plater to qualify was increased because of the work done by this group and because of that accident. It was also great to give them some money last year to help with developing the Southern Cross LADS driver training facility that will happen as well.

There will be some money for the Coutts Crossing Cougars Football Club as well, and the Wollongbar multisports facility is going to get $500,000. This is a magnificent sporting development that is happening. We have a new deputy speaker here—if you have not been to the region, Deputy Speaker Goodenough, you will have to come over. Wollongbar-Alstonville Plateau—just inland from Ballina, which is a little bit south of Byron Bay—is a plateau that is very rich in alluvial soil and has wonderful panoramic views. They are building a new sporting facility there that is going to be a regional hub. It was great to commit some money there to build a new clubhouse. There is also the Big River Sailing Club on the Clarence, as well as the Yamba marine rescue.

The last one I would just like to mention is the Oakes Oval redevelopment in Lismore. The Oakes Oval is the premier sporting facility in Lismore. It hosts soccer and cricket. Rugby is played on it, as well as a little bit of rugby league. It is going to be redeveloped so that it can cater for AFL as well, with a bit of an oval extension. There is also going to be a great upgrade of the grandstand area, the facilities and the change-room facilities to make it even more of a premier sporting facility than it already is. Again, the focus of all this is to create more commerce and more economic activity so that our regions thrive and can offer more facilities and experiences for the people who come here.

Lastly, I would like to say a couple of things. I would really like to again acknowledge and thank the community who were so generous as to give me the privilege to be their representative again in this parliament. As I said, every day I am grateful for that. It is a great thing for a community to give someone. As I said, I am a community representative first and a political party member second.

I would also like to thank the team. To do this, obviously you need a lot of support around you, and I had a number of people. I would just like to name a few of them: Albert Enzerick, Andrew Gordon, Peter Carlill, Col Humphries, Deb Newton and Fiona Leviny, who, in their own areas, were leaders for me; they did a lot of work to put a lot of the logistics together. Over in Casino there were people like Stan Gricks, Martin Moloney, David Shay, Judy Humphries, and Fran White, and Col Humphries as well did some magnificent and really hard work for me; he put in a lot of hours. I thank them. In Grafton, Denise and Cec Hyde were fantastic, and I thank them very much. But there were really far too many to name.

I would also, obviously, like to acknowledge and thank my office staff: Peter, and Sheree, Jason and Mark, who did a lot of work as well.

Lastly, whenever you do a role like this and you are a community representative, obviously your family are involved. As someone mentioned, in this role, you are the volunteer and your family are the conscripts. I think, in some ways, that is very true—especially in a regional place. We are very public figures in our regional communities when we play these roles. I know that is so with my own family: my wife, Karen, and my children Bridget, Sean and Rosie. I am very proud of my children. I love my wife very much. Everything we do, we try to do together. We do it as a team. We try to be very supportive of everything that we do, in whatever field it may be. Again, an election campaign is certainly a very time-consuming and a very focused thing that we do. I would like to finish this by saying that I love them very much and I am very thankful for their support. They have encouraged me. My wife, Karen, has encouraged me, and my children have been very supportive, and we have taken this journey together.

I have had a number of careers. I have been a school teacher. I have been a bond trader; I traded a multi-billion-dollar portfolio. I have been an investment officer of a super fund. I have done a number of things; some of them, dare I say, paid a lot more than this role, and some of them would appear a little bit, you know, whatever. But I can honestly say that I have never had such a sense of giving and of appreciation for what I do, because, in this role, we have the great gift, because of people that we know or people that we associate with, that we can help people. One of the great joys that I have had is to be able to help people—not so much necessarily in all the things that I just read out there, but to help them with issues that to them are really important; issues which, in the big scheme of things, may not be significant, but which, to them, are very, very important and which it is very important to them to have help to resolve. I have had the benefit of being able to help people in some of these things, and this role has enabled me to do that, and I am very thankful.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My community of Parramatta and the surrounding areas is undergoing great change. If you read the newspapers in the Sydney-wide press, or you talk to people who do not live in the area, they will talk to you about the extraordinary change in Parramatta. It is almost like picking up Chatswood, which is glass high-rises, and dumping it on Parramatta—and what a good thing that is. Well, so they say. Who wouldn't say it is a good thing?

When you approach Parramatta you see cranes in the sky; you see high-rises just growing into the air—incredible activity in the Parramatta area. But, when you live there and you talk to local people, there is a sense of unease that is growing. In many ways it feels like a lack of power to affect what is happening in our community, an inability to voice their concerns, a lack of transparency. Part of that draws from the fact that we are one of the areas that has had our councils abolished. There are two new councils: one is Parramatta and the other one is Cumberland. At the moment, we have no democratically elected representatives, and I would say quite openly that there are some things that are happening in both areas that simply would not have happened if we still have elected councils.

When you talk to people you get this sense of frustration at a lack of consultation, a sense of a lack of power to influence decisions that are being made and a sense that the decisions are being made elsewhere by people who actually do not know who we are. Not all of the decisions makes sense. Even people that are really quite pro-growth and want to see Parramatta move ahead incredibly quickly still have a sense of unease about how these decisions are being made.

I want to use the time that I have today to talk about my community and exactly who we are. We are a community with an extraordinary sense of place. You do not say you live in Sydney, if you live in Parramatta or its surroundings; you say you live in Parramatta. You only have to live there a couple of months to get a sense that you are in a place that is very special. It gets under your skin really quickly, and it is hard to know why that is.

It is worth noting that it was the gathering place for the Indigenous tribes right up to the Hawkesbury, right up to the Blue Mountains—they all came to Parramatta for their meetings. They also sensed that it was a special place. It is an extraordinary place in many ways. Whether it is Toongabbie, Dundas, Harris Park or Mays Hill or Granville, it is a place of great diversity and great history.

Paul Keating once described a politician—I will not say who—as 'all tip and no berg'. Those of us who know Parramatta really well know that, while we have tip, that is nothing compared to the size and scale and capacity that sits slightly out of view. There is a level of energy that is in the community, and you have to know the community really well to see it. I am going to talk bit about that.

For a start we have an extraordinary collection of assets. We have more heritage assets than The Rocks. There is the first female convict factory, designed by Francis Greenway, and the Roman Catholic orphanage, where the children of the first convicts were kept, that later became the mechanical institute for girls and then the Parramatta Girls Home. With the convict factory, there is a continuous history of women's imprisonment from modern settlement right up to the last decade.

All that you learned in primary school happened in Parramatta, from the Rum Corps to Macquarie. It was all there. We had Pemulwuy, one of the great Indigenous warriors, who rampaged through Merrylands so effectively that people thought he could not be killed. We had Samuel Marsden visit with his 18 Maori chiefs and stroll through the streets of Parramatta town. They left their 18 children in the colony as a symbol of good faith. They all died of smallpox and are buried on the riverbank in Parramatta.

We have Elizabeth Macarthur farm. We had the Battle of Vinegar Hill, where the Irish were going to attack the soldiers but accidently got drunk and blew it—as they do. We have the girls orphanage on the banks of the Parramatta River. It is an extraordinary collection of heritage assets, and you only have to dig at tiny bit on any new development and you will find Indigenous artefacts that date back tens of thousands of years.

Parramatta River is the principal tributary of Sydney Harbour. You can get on a boat in Sydney Harbour and you can go all the way up the Parramatta River to the Parramatta ferry. You cannot get the extra couple of kilometres anymore because of weirs on the confluence of Darling Mills Creek and Toongabbie Creek, where the river begins. But that is the spot where Governor Phillip landed and walked down the banks of the Parramatta River—and the Phillip diaries are actually a record of his walk. Then he got to The Crescent, where the Indigenous people had their principal meeting place, and picked that as the site for Government House, which is still there today, in the oldest gazetted national park in the world, known as Parramatta Park. It is an extraordinary place. We have amazing green space in Parramatta Park, which I just mentioned, but also Lake Parramatta, which was the colony's first dam and provided the water supply for the colony. If you start walking from there up Darling Mills Creek, you can walk all the way to the Hawkesbury in not that long a time. You can do it in less than a day. So we have these incredible natural and heritage assets in our region. There are 30 creeks that flow through the region, and, while in the early days we built our cities with our backs to them, they are still essentially there.

We have some fantastic strip shopping centres. If you want butchers and greengrocers, you cannot beat Merrylands, Guildford and Harris Park. Some of those little strip shopping centres have five or six butchers and three or four fruit shops, and you can get food from all around the world right there. We potentially have, if someone chooses to take it up, the best foodie train around. You would get off at Auburn for the Turkish and Middle Eastern food, then at Granville for Lebanese and Nepalese food and then at Harris Park for food from all the regions of India—there are Gujurati and Telugu restaurants. You used to have to go all the way to Pendle Hill for a Telugu chilli bhaji, but now you can get them in Telugu restaurants in Harris Park. You would go to Merrylands for Afghani food, to Guildford for African and to Cabramatta for Vietnamese. You would be out of my electorate by then, but the food that is available along that train line is just waiting for someone to package it and turn it into a viable business model that generates business in those areas. Western Sydney is actually one of Australia's biggest food producers. You would not know it unless you looked for it, but we have yoghurt makers and a lot of halal food producers. We also have people who make idli batter and dosa batter for the local communities. It is wide open for export—there is incredible food capacity in Western Sydney waiting to be expanded.

We speak every language. We have a knowledge of the world in us that is quite extraordinary. If you want to build a business that targets Asia or the Middle East or Africa, we have highly skilled, highly qualified people who are bilingual and trilingual—and, in some cases, speak six languages. We have people who have concepts in their minds that they can express in one language and not others because they have this capacity to see the world from a range of perspectives. We are seeing the research now that diversity increases profit—well, we have it. We really do have it all.

We also have some incredibly high tech companies in some of our warehouse areas. We have Thales, one of the best companies in Australia for innovation, just up the road, but there are a whole stack of others, too, that sit in some of our warehouse districts. If you did not know it was there, you would miss the company that does—or used to do—the Toyota bumper bar on its CAD/CAM. We have really quite great companies and an incredible workforce that, in many cases, has to leave Parramatta and go into the city to work. We have the Western Sydney University, with all of its cultural studies and its amazing collection of professors and academic staff. If you are looking for people who really explore cultural diversity, they are there. If you are looking for people who understand innovation in the modern context, they are there.

So we have this amazing capacity within our community, which I fear we may lose if the planning of this rapid change in Parramatta is not very carefully done—and I fear that it is not being carefully done. One of the issues about Parramatta which is perhaps most frustrating for us all is that, perhaps because we do not all work and live in the same suburb anymore, it can be very difficult for us to see each other. Many of us get on trains in the morning and are whisked off to far-flung places, so you do not necessarily get to see the great wealth that is there. I am very lucky; I do see it because I get invited, but many of us do not. There is, in many ways, a lack of fertile ground for really good ideas to fall on. When I meet an extraordinary young entrepreneur, one of the most important things I quite often do is just introduce them to others, because they cannot see each other in this community that we have. There is the sense that, while the capacity is there, we have a long way to go to actually harness it in the way we need to.

One of the things that we are seeing about the development that is of big concern to me in terms of that capacity is the gradual rezoning of some of the areas that contain the older warehouse-style buildings where local businesses actually grow. Great cities of the world are putting aside areas that cannot be residential, areas where the old warehouses are, because they are the places where new technology companies and local businesses grow and first appear. In Parramatta we are seeing those old areas being demolished, quite often for residential development. We are losing areas where people work and, instead, we are seeing high-rise residential go in. They are actually job losing, except for retail jobs, which quite often are casual and less skilled. We are losing skilled and semi-skilled jobs and we are getting, in many cases, a lower number of retail jobs, and if we do not start preserving the kinds of buildings and the kind of accommodation that new and young and innovative businesses can afford to rent we will quite quickly lose our capacity to grow our local businesses.

It is great when big business moves in. It is terrific. We have had Deloitte move in. PwC is moving in. We have fantastic big companies buying some of the commercial properties in Parramatta so those big companies can come in. That is fantastic, but for our long-term prosperity we also need to grow our own local businesses using the extraordinary diversity and strength that we have. Major redevelopments in the current Granville industrial precinct will see essentially all of that go and become residential. The Camellia precinct, which is where the Shell refinery was, but which has also had some other very large businesses, is going residential as well. The heritage precinct in North Parramatta, which contains over 70 heritage buildings, is now segmented for sale for residential development.

There is a concern that, while high-rise residential is a good short-term bang, it alone will not lead Parramatta to grow into a great city in the way that it could. Great cities are places where you live, not just where you sleep, and we are not just losing the areas where local businesses can grow and develop, we are also losing other things as well, such as our riverbank and our amenities. We are a river city. Traditionally, river cities start fairly low on the riverbanks and then go up so that the community can actually enjoy the amenity of the riverbank. If you go into the Parramatta council's chambers now and look at the big buildings that are planned, we have some very high buildings on the riverbank. We have one that is over 60 storeys. It is just topping out now. On the riverbank, you can go to 60 storeys, but we have had commercial premises in the heart of the CBD, just three or four blocks away in the city, that have been restricted to 20 storeys. In the city you cannot go high, but on the riverbank, which should belong to us all, we are seeing quite high developments, which I doubt anybody thinks is a good idea. We always assumed that our access to the riverbanks was permanent. We are finding further down the river that we are getting eight-storey buildings almost like a wall on either side of the river, so our amenity is disappearing.

We always expected the heritage precinct, which I mentioned before, which is now being carved up for sale, would be a major community asset. Parts of it are being preserved for later sale when the government decides what to do with those heritage buildings. However, for many of us it has always been the case that you decide what to do with the heritage buildings first—you make it work for the community, and then you decide what you do around it. For us, it is backwards to say: we are going to go residential first and we will make a decision on its use later.

We have an Olympic-standard swimming pool in the heart of the CBD of Parramatta until 31 March. Then the state government is going to demolish it to build the biggest stadium. It is currently on park trust land. It was built by the people of Parramatta back in the fifties. It is a war memorial pool. It has one of two Olympic diving towers in Sydney. It has a water polo pool. It has 10 lanes so that if you want to conduct a swimming carnival you can compete over eight lanes and warm up over two. Just a few years ago, the Parramatta council spent over $7 million refurbishing it because they assumed it would continue to be there. It is a great city asset. The state government decided to abolish it. Again, we have no elected council to oppose that. There is no commitment to rebuilding it. It is one of at least three pools in the region that are now under threat. It teaches 1,300 people to swim. On a hot day there are 1,500 people that go there. There are all sorts of reasons why you would not do this. The community does not want it, they did not consult on it and yet they are doing it, at a time when the community has no power. I have been swimming in that pool since it had cold outdoor showers in winter—as many have—and I will go for my last swim there on 31 March. I will see a great community asset taken from us by a government that did not ask, did not consult and does not care what we think.

We have a new light rail project coming in, and none of us are going to complain about the fact that we are getting a new light rail project. Some of us would complain that it rips up a heavy rail line that could potentially go through to Epping. It essentially wipes out that option. By ripping up that heavy line to Carlingford and going light rail from Carlingford, the option of us actually having a link through to the major employment hubs at Macquarie Park, Macquarie University and Epping—the opportunity for people in Parramatta and people in those regions to commute backwards and forwards between the two employment hubs—will go. We will end up with light rail that, rather than going down to Clyde so that people in Carlingford can get a faster train to the city, will go all the way into Parramatta and stop two blocks from Parramatta station. It is slower.

There are some really good things about the light rail, but one would have to question a state government that rips up the opportunity for heavy rail between major employment hubs and instead builds a light rail into the CBD for a suburb that is a few kilometres from the CBD. We question that. It was not what the local community wanted. The local community wanted light rail to Castle Hill. They wanted light rail cross-city—not into the city but across the western suburbs so that people could get to other sections, so that you could get to Bankstown, so that people in Bankstown could get to Parramatta, so that people in Epping could get to Parramatta, so that people in the suburbs surrounding Parramatta could get to the work hubs of Macquarie Park, in that quite dense area up there, and up to Norwest, also a major employment centre. Instead, we have a light rail that we are told is the first part of a bigger project which will eventually link through to Strathfield, running parallel to the current heavy rail. It seems very much that this is a light rail project that serves a new area of development but does not do a great deal for the people who are already struggling with a lack of public transport options. It does not do a great deal at all.

We are also concerned about the increasing loss of our local services in the community. We lost the Police Citizens Youth Club a few months ago. The Salvation Army sold its premises a few months ago. When your state body has offered $30 million-plus for your city site, it is very hard for you to say no. While we are the second CBD in Sydney, we would say we are quite a separate CBD. We are in one of the biggest economies in Australia and we have the second-highest number of homeless people of any area in Australia every night. We are starting to lose the services that we need in a CBD like ours to serve the most vulnerable. We are very worried that, as those land prices go up, we will lose more and more of those services. We are very lucky that Parramatta Mission are staying put. They have made plans to stay exactly where they are. They are a major feeder of and service for the homeless. We fear that we will lose many others.

In summary, I hope I have outlined what an extraordinary community we are and how we need far more input into the decisions that are being made at the moment. Without a locally elected council, at a time when two councils have administrators and there is no democratic process at all, the state government is making decisions that I firmly believe they would not be able to make if our councils were in fear of their positions—and they would be.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 6.30 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 192. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.