Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

The Airports Amendment Bill 2016 amends the Airports Act to streamline the process for development at and around federally leased airports. While Labor mostly welcomes this bill, we are proposing two amendments: firstly, that the monetary trigger threshold for major development plans be reduced to $25 million and, secondly, that the automatic approval of requests for shorter public consultation periods in relation to major development plans around airports be removed.

Labor supports investment in aviation, and we're committed to growing this crucial sector in our economy. Airports are economic powerhouses. I know this because I represent the electorate that has Australia's largest and busiest airport. I'm very proud to represent the electorate of Kingsford Smith, which bears the name of Australia's most famous aviator, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the legendary Smithy, who lost his life at the all-too-young age of 38 in 1935. My electorate also hosts Australia's largest and busiest airport, which bears Kingsford Smith's name. Last year, Sydney's Kingsford Smith airport was used by 43.3 million passengers. That's an increase of over five million passengers each year from 2013. As the previous speaker mentioned, Kingsford Smith airport is now the 20th busiest airport in the world. Today, more than 40 per cent of overseas travellers visiting Australia pass through Kingsford Smith airport.

The airport, like many others across Australia, is seeing an increasing number of visitors, in particular, from Asia. In particular, it's Asia's rising middle class who are now making the most of new opportunities to travel, and for many that choice of travel is to our great southern land. It's a big-picture trend that's likely to continue, with 88 per cent of the world's next billion entrants into the middle class coming from Asia. That's 380 million people from India's middle class, 350 million from China's middle class and 210 million in the rest of Asia. We know that when people move out of poverty and into higher income brackets, into the middle class, they gain an appetite for services, particularly healthcare services, education services and, importantly, tourism and travel services. For many in Asia, Australia is now a very popular destination because it's in their backyard, it's within the same time zone and it's easily accessible by air. So it's clear that our airports are vital to Australia's economy in helping to boost tourism and trade as well.

Later this month, Sydney Airport will release its latest 20-year draft blueprint for the future of Kingsford Smith airport. The airport says it's forecasting passenger numbers to reach 65 million in 2039. Yet Sydney Airport says the No. 1 community concern facing Kingsford Smith now and over the next two decades is the crippling road congestion and poor public transport links to the airport. There are very few other international airports that I know of where, if you leave the international airport, you are straight onto a domestic and suburban street, but that is exactly the case at Sydney's international airport and domestic airport, particularly when you leave the domestic terminal. You're straight onto Robey Street in Mascot. People live in Robey Street. It's their life. Their houses are there. Their garages are there. They park there. Yet we're dumping all of this traffic onto local streets from the busiest airport in the country, without any real public transport links and without any consideration for those that live around the airport.

The suburban streets around the airport are now clogged with traffic on a daily basis. If you go to Sydney airport any time after 5 am, you are almost guaranteed to get into a traffic jam. Once again, we've seen that the New South Wales Liberal government has failed the public when it comes to key infrastructure and planning and when it comes to spending around taking some of the pressure off our community—the community that I represent—in respect of the airport. I'm getting a number of letters and emails from constituents who are telling me that people who are going overseas or going on a flight will simply park in their street and leave their car there for weeks or, in some cases, months and walk with their bags to the airport, and they can do this because the airport is only down the road. For some areas, it's less than a 500-metre walk to the terminal from some of the suburban streets that people are now parking in.

As I mentioned earlier, Kingsford Smith is, of course, Australia's busiest airport. Yet, when you talk about busy airports throughout the world, the one thing that they all tend to have is very good public transport links. That's certainly not the case with Kingsford Smith Airport in Mascot because, believe it or not, there is only one bus route that services Sydney airport. The 400 service bus that comes from Bondi Junction and Burwood remains the only bus service that gets in and out of Kingsford Smith Airport. For years now, the operators of the airport, Sydney Airport Corporation Limited, have been crying out to the New South Wales Liberal government saying, 'We need additional bus services if we're going to get more people in and out of the airport on public transport rather than using cars.'

Four years ago, the New South Wales Liberal government unveiled their so-called long-term plans to improve bus access at Kingsford Smith Airport. And what have they done about it since then? Zero, zilch, not a thing. It's clear that Premier Gladys Berejiklian has been asleep at the wheel yet again on infrastructure policy and planning when it comes to the future growth of Kingsford Smith Airport, and often it's the airport workers that are left in the lurch as a result. There are 30,900 people who work at Kingsford Smith Airport. As I said earlier, airports are economic powerhouses, and they provide a lot of jobs for people in the surrounding community. Forty-four per cent of those who work at the airport live in the St George-Sutherland area, represented quite ably by the shadow minister that's sitting with me here at the table, the member for Barton. Yet, there are no direct public transport links from that area to the airport. Where most of the people that work at the airport live, there is no direct public transport link for them to be able to get on public transport to actually get to work. That is an absolute disgrace. For a large metropolitan capital like Sydney, with the busiest airport in the country, to not have a public transport link to where most of the people work to access the airport is beyond a joke.

When it comes to rail services, it doesn't get any better, unfortunately. Around 24 per cent of passengers and people working at Kingsford Smith catch trains to and from the airport, and that's up from 13 per cent a decade ago. Yet most airports around Europe and Asia have between 40 and 60 per cent of passengers travelling to and from them by train. Why does Sydney airport have such low numbers of both passengers and workers accessing the airport by train compared to global benchmarks? One good reason is that workers and passengers are slugged a one-way fee of $18.10 to travel to the airport during peak hours. To travel what is really a five-minute trip on the train from areas like Hurstville or the City of Sydney to the airport will cost you $18.10 during peak hour, and that's a single trip fare. And $13.80 of the fare is the station access fee that's paid to the New South Wales government. Is it any wonder that the non-existent bus services and the rip-off that is associated with the train fare into Sydney airport has forced all of that congestion onto local roads? The community and the people who I represent are bearing that congestion and are fed up with it. They want the New South Wales Liberal government and, indeed, the Turnbull government to do something about it.

The New South Wales Liberal government say that they are improving the road network via the wonderful WestConnex. Isn't that going to be just sensational for the community that I represent? Here, you've got WestConnex—believe it or not, it is the largest road project in Sydney—going straight past the second busiest container port in the country, at Port Botany, and straight past Sydney international airport with no connection at all to those two vitally important pieces of infrastructure. For anyone who is travelling from the west and wants to access Sydney airport, guess what? They will get off at the St Peters-Tempe interchange, which is about four or five kilometres away from the actual airport. How do you think they are going to get to the airport, if they're travelling there? I tell you what they're going to do: they're going to come down the suburban streets that I mentioned earlier—particularly Gardeners Road and Botany Road, which are already clogged with traffic as it is—and they are going to dump an additional hundreds of thousands of cars per month on those suburban streets.

The other point to make is, because there is no access to the second biggest container port in the country, many of those vehicles that will be travelling down those roads will be the big B-doubles that carry freight in and out of the port. Not only are you going to have passengers from Sydney airport competing to go down these roads but you are also going to get these big freight trucks that take freight to and from the port coming down Botany Road, Gardeners Road and Robey Street—the streets that I mentioned earlier—putting additional congestion on our roads. It is any wonder that, with the non-existent bus services and the rip-off to get a train, workers are forced onto these congested roads? Every day around 160,000 people are going to and from the airport and yet the New South Wales Liberal government have no plan on how to solve the current congestion crisis, let alone a plan for future growth and the numbers that are coming over the coming decades.

Aircraft noise is always an issue around airports. I probably have more complaints than most MPs, given the busy nature of Sydney airport. I have written to the respective transport ministers. I know that there is a long-term operating plan for Sydney airport and that the majority of flights are meant to go out over the sea rather than over homes; but regularly, when we check on the Airservices Australia website, they are not meeting the targets that are set down under the long-term operating plan. We get complaints from constituents, understandably, for the increasing noise that we're seeing around the airport. With the advent of modern aircraft, flights have become more efficient, more powerful and quieter. We should be able to send more of those flights out over the water rather than over people's households.

We've seen a massive increase in the traffic from helicopters over Sydney airport as well. There were 5,776 helicopter trips in 2010 to and from Sydney airport. That has now risen to 15,730 in 2017, which is about a 173 per cent increase in helicopter trips over the last seven years. Most of them are coming from the airport straight out over Mascot, Pagewood and Maroubra. Once they get out to the sea, they do a left-hand turn, go straight up the coast, do a joy ride around the harbour and then come back and do the same trip. By the time that they are getting back to Sydney airport, they're flying very low when they're coming in over households. We've had a lot of complaints from constituents about this.

Our airports are pieces of critical national infrastructure. They deserve better. Our airports don't operate in isolation. They are part of our community. They can have significant impacts on people and places. That's why the development of our airports needs to be well planned and done in consultation with communities. That is the key: ensuring that there is consultation with communities. Labor supports investment in aviation infrastructure. As I said earlier, airports are economic powerhouses, but it needs to be done in consultation with communities. That's why we're proposing that the trigger for development plans be dropped from $35 million to $25 million and that this proposal to ensure that the time line can be reduced for consultation with communities be rejected. Consultation with communities is the key to ensuring that we have viable, workable airports that provide jobs for people and also important travel and tourism services.

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