Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Every couple of months I'm out at railway stations in the electorate, and I watch commuters pile in to railway stations at Mount Druitt, Rooty Hill and Doonside. Sometimes the row is five deep with people crowding onto those trains. If they have not been successful in the mad dash for a seat, they are standing for around an hour, or even longer. If they have come from my colleague's electorate of Lindsay, from Penrith, they have been standing for ages waiting to get to work. I have been thinking of those commuters in a climate where tolls have been reimposed on the M4and where the train timetable in Sydney is a mess. What plan has been put forward to help struggling commuters? Well, all I'm hearing about at this point are plans for a new rail line, north-south, connecting Badgerys Creek Airport to the already congested Western Sydney line. There is no comprehensive plan to deal with people movement in Western Sydney, just a plan to put more people onto a crowded train network. It is unfathomable that that is all we've got.

We hear talk, announcement after announcement, about this airport: 'It's an amazing piece of infrastructure.' It's an airport with no planes. We hear all these announcements about boards being created, where the bulk of the people on the boards don't come from the region. We hear about a headquarters being announced in Parramatta for something that's happening in Liverpool. We hear about earthworks being done, and tens of thousands of jobs. It was going to be creating 60,000 jobs; now it's going to create roughly 11,000 jobs, based on what the minister was telling us the other day. But we don't hear anything about flight paths. We don't hear anything about a jobs plan. In fact, the best we've got for a jobs plan is the Minister for Urban Infrastructure and Cities, Paul Fletcher, saying, 'Of course, locals will be well placed to apply for those jobs'—no guarantee of jobs; just that you can apply for them.

I used to hear Slim Dusty lament about the pub with no beer, but the Turnbull government are absolutely giddy about an airport with no planes. They won't tell people where the planes are flying, and in fact in their EIS they deliberately avoided having Airservices Australia do the work to map out the flight paths, because Airservices Australia would have had to consult with people about the flight paths. This is four years. Ten billion dollars has been announced for this airport. We know exactly what's going on: the money's being loaded up; all the spend is being done; no people are being told how they will be affected, because at the point when they find out they will have no choice but to cop this facility, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is a disgraceful way in which $10 billion is being spent. So to any of you who complain about infrastructure dollars not coming your way: just know how quickly $10 billion was spent on one project with little detail.