Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

He is ignorant about the M2. There was a study done under the Howard government that set the route for that project. The minister might like to tell his assistant, the junior minister, exactly what happened with the M2.

I refer also to page 175 of Battlelines by Tony Abbott, who spoke about the need for the M4, essentially to connect people from Western Sydney with the city, and also for a connection from the western suburbs to Port Botany. I refer to the media release from WestConnex which says that the M4 is being extended, titled 'Stage 1—M4: widening and extension from Parramatta to Haberfield'. Haberfield is in my electorate. It is not in the city. It is no longer a road to the city. It is a road to a traffic jam at Haberfield, if that is the final outcome. Stage 3 is the M4 south from Haberfield to St Peters. Stage 2 is the M5 east duplication from Beverly Hills to St Peters.

People should just drive down King Street, Newtown, or any of the roads around St Peters that are already massively congested. It is to the west of Sydney airport, where even this morning it took me 40 minutes to get from Marrickville to the airport—a distance of just a few kilometres—and you are proposing with this new design to no longer take it to the port. The key elements are getting people to the city and freight to the port. You need to make sure that you get infrastructure right, not take people to Haberfield and trucks to St Peters, which is what is being proposed in the joint press release from the Prime Minister and the Premier. I support good infrastructure projects, I support good infrastructure projects that are got right. This is not getting it right. Previous governments have got it wrong in not making the M5 wide enough in the first place, so we need to make sure that it is got right and it is not a road to a traffic jam.

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