Melissa McIntosh (Lindsay, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My community has been campaigning hard. They have been campaigning against unfair flight paths. We are soon to have 220 flights per day at low altitude over thousands of residents in the communities of Lindsay—18 different flight paths over the Nepean River. People enjoying their lives and livelihoods, as they do in Western Sydney, will soon be extremely disturbed by the flights. We deserve to have fair noise mitigation in the homes that are impacted most. The most upsetting thing about all this is that this announcement was made to my community, not directly by the minister for infrastructure but at 12 am via the media. We have been hoodwinked, absolutely hoodwinked. There was no anticipation that the community would be impacted to such a scale.

The 2016 EIS had very different flight paths. We want the airport. It will be a tremendous economic lift for everyone in Western Sydney with the jobs that it will bring; our kids will not have to commute out of the area. We know that there will be flights; we are not silly people. We just want them to be fair and right, and now they are not. I'm calling on the government to revisit the EIS and make these flight paths fair for Western Sydney.