Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of answers to questions asked of Senator Conroy today and, in particular, those relating to Western Sydney, because I actually agree with Senator Nash: I cannot believe the fuss and palaver that has gone on over the fact that the Prime Minister is visiting Western Sydney with her cabinet colleagues. They are visiting a very large community, over one million people, who deserve the opportunity to meet with their representatives and who deserve the opportunity to raise with ministers and their local members, the concerns that they have. When you think about the extraordinary challenges the communities of Western Sydney will confront over the next few years, you can understand why those conversations are going to be so important.

A recent report actually forecast that half of Sydney's population will be living in Greater Western Sydney by 2036. An example of the impact that that population expansion in the west will have is that it will require about 87,000 new homes to be built in that time. So there are key challenges, but, if 87,000 homes are being constructed in Western Sydney, there are many, many opportunities as well—opportunities for employment; opportunities for planning infrastructure so that social infrastructure in particular does not get left behind and opportunities for drawing on the very diverse multicultural workforce and industry base that will be out in Western Sydney. These are the opportunities, the challenges and the issues that the Prime Minister and the cabinet are going to be dealing with in the next few years.

Senator Nash also said that the Prime Minister will not necessarily like what she hears. I have to say that is probably true. She probably will not be very pleased to hear about the 15,000 jobs being cut from the New South Wales Public Service and the fact that some of those jobs are in significant areas. In policing, for example, the regional commands in rural New South Wales are being quarantined, which means that the real impacts are going to be on policing in Western Sydney. So the conversations that are going on in Western Sydney about gun control, street violence or domestic violence are going to be severely affected by the New South Wales government cuts.

The Prime Minister is probably not going to be very impressed by the fact that New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell originally committed to building the North West Rail Link to connect the North Shore with the Hills district in Sydney's north-west, then asked the government to redirect the funds earmarked for the Parramatta to Epping railway line to the North West Rail Link, and then came back and changed his mind and requested that those funds be redirected to finishing the upgrade of the Pacific Highway—which is hardly going to benefit the people of Western Sydney, I imagine. I would say that we can all expect that the Parramatta to Epping rail line project, to which we have committed $2.1 billion—and we still hold that commitment—and which would free up commuter traffic in Western Sydney, is forever dead under the O'Farrell government. These are the kinds of things that she is going to hear.

The Prime Minister is probably not going to be very happy to hear how people in Western Sydney are so concerned about the dog-whistling policies that we have heard over the last few days about the way in which we treat people seeking refugee and humanitarian status. She is probably not going to be too happy to hear the Leader of the Opposition's ideas about TPVs and freezing bridging visas, or racial profiling, because in Western Sydney we have a very diverse multicultural community that is fantastic. It is an economic and cultural powerhouse of New South Wales and it is the fastest growing regional economy in Australia. So when 43 per cent of the population of Sydney is living in Western Sydney, the Prime Minister deserves to be there.