Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the appropriation bills before the House today. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: my community is crying out for investment from this government. The Macarthur region is experiencing rapid population growth. My wife was born in the electorate. With my wife, I moved back to the electorate over 40 years ago, and we have seen incredible growth. Our population has been increasing exponentially and is projected to continue to rise as rapidly over the coming years. This rapid growth in population has been by design. Respective state and federal governments have planned for and allowed this growth to occur. I use the word 'planned' very, very loosely. Very little thought has been given by the coalition to the present and future needs of my community, and their recent budget is unfortunately indicative of that.

Our community's rapid expansion in population has been unchecked. Those opposite have been complicit in allowing unchecked urban sprawl to take place and have encouraged overdevelopment. Population growth is not necessarily a bad thing. Macarthur is a wonderful place to live, and I cannot fault people for wanting to call Macarthur home. However, the government is allowing my community, to this very day, to be overdeveloped without providing adequate infrastructure. Development must be adequately planned for. This is the role of government.

Consideration of things such as public health facilities, schools, roads and public transport should be a given—but not when it comes to my community, unfortunately. This government has not considered any of this. We have schools that have over 40 demountable classrooms. All could have been planned for yet was not. Those opposite and their friends in Macquarie Street are allowing the south-west to be turned into the plaything of their developer mates at the expense of the battlers. They are allowing development to occur unchecked and are failing to provide essential infrastructure and services to my community.

Housing is unaffordable, and it has been for some time. However, the answer is not to merely increase the supply of housing in Sydney's market. This ought to be part of the government's plans. The fact that they are forcing south-west to shoulder the majority of this burden without adequate planning is disgraceful. My community is one of the most mortgage stressed in the state. People have been struggling to make ends meet since long before the COVID-19 pandemic and recession. I do not define affordable housing as encouraging developers to charge half a million dollars for a 300 square metre block of land on the outskirts of Sydney with no public transport in a newly developed suburb with no public infrastructure. This government's failure to plan for this rapid growth and its rubberstamping approach to developers are really damaging young people, their young families and their future, and place my community at great risk.

Our communities are presently under-resourced to deal with the growth. Our schools are at capacity, our hospital wards are full, our outpatient clinics are overbooked and under-resourced, our roads are congested and unemployment and underemployment are rife. The government have demonstrated once again in their budget that they have no plans to address this. I have sought to work constructively with all levels of government ever since I came into parliament. I think that some of the best work in this place comes at times when we act in a spirit of bipartisanship and work cooperatively together for the greater good for our population. However, this budget is a slap in the face to Macarthur residents.

The coalition, at the state and federal level, are blatantly engaging in class and ideological warfare. Inequality is on the rise, and the Liberal and National government are determined to continue to ignore the needs of some of our most at risk communities. Those opposite can rationalise their budget any way they want, but I will not stand for the spin and self-congratulatory messages that I'm seeing the government undertake.

I want to break this down very quickly. This budget will deliver $1 trillion of debt for Australia. That's a lot of money. This tired, third-term Liberal-National government is starving my community and stifling economic activity as a result. Young people are leaving school with no jobs to go to. Young people are leaving school and being forced to accrue a huge HECS debt to go to university. They're not being offered apprenticeships and they're not being offered jobs in the new economy.

History tells us that recessions are the time to embark on bold and nation-building initiatives. We're getting nothing of that from this government. Job-creating projects, such as building the Sydney Harbour Bridge and creating Snowy Hydro, have been deliberate initiatives of government in times of economic contraction to create jobs and stir economic activity. They certainly work. This coalition are doing nothing of the sort. Had they really given due consideration to our economic recovery at the very least they would not have planned for continued urban sprawl without infrastructure. They should be funding essential projects in the rapidly growing south-west part of Sydney, which is the most rapidly growing part of Sydney. They are not.

Through the pork-barrelling efforts of those opposite, both before the recession and now, we stand to be left behind. There have been sport rorts, arts rorts and all sorts of rorts, yet south-west Sydney gets nothing. They're more than happy to fund projects that will benefit Liberal-voting communities while at the same time ignoring the needs of Macarthur. One example of this that I really want to talk about is the government's abysmal handling of the Western Sydney Airport. I don't care about the land deals. I don't care about what rorts they've done with the conservative electorates around Sydney and around the country. What I care about is infrastructure for south-west Sydney, and they're giving us nothing.

The so-called city deals have been spectacularly pathetic for Macarthur. We're getting a billabong. That's all we're getting. There's no infrastructure. We are getting a billabong so that the federal members who get delivered to Macarthur for five minutes can have a picture opportunity and leave. But they don't care.

They have committed to half the rail link to the Western Sydney airport—only to the north, not to the south-west. Shockingly, they continue to refuse to commit to providing the necessary rail link to Macarthur to provide not only a commuter link to the Western Sydney airport but for all the suburbs developing to the south of the airport—Gregory Hills, Arcadian Hills and Oran Park. All these new suburbs have no public transport infrastructure. It's an absolute tragedy and a disaster in the making, and every planning expert says so.

There's one rule for Liberal-National Party friends at the top end of town and another rule for the west and south-west. It's a matter of priorities. The coalition can find money to give handouts to subsidise the operations of a billionaire media mogul's empire, award lucrative government contracts to unknown entities, pay the member for Fadden's internet bills, perform publicity stunts on Christmas Island, give grants to lucrative sporting clubs with ties to the Liberal Party, detain and attack a family that has been welcomed with open arms by the community, mismanage irrigation licences, backflip on the NBN, purchase—and this is completely bizarre—medals for Sir Prince Philip and overpay for parcels of land, but they can't provide the infrastructure in south-west Sydney.

The former Speaker spent $5,000 on an 80-kilometre helicopter flight. The member for Farrer went on a taxpayer funded apartment shopping spree. The former Treasurer and Ambassador to the US made taxpayers foot the bill for nannies. The age of entitlement for those opposite never stops. Are we supposed to believe that this is responsible governance and sound economic management? I don't think so. At the same time as allowing all this waste to go on, these are a few things that the coalition has refused to fund for Macarthur. They refused to provide funding to establish a desperately needed Shepherd centre of excellence in Campbelltown, which I've long advocated for, to service children with hearing loss and their families, forcing them to travel many kilometres by public transport into Sydney to get services. Shame! They refused to fund a rail line to the new airport from Leppington, continuing the rail line where the corridor is already preserved, which would both serve our community for commuter transport and also provide a freight link to the new Western Sydney airport and a connection from Western Sydney airport to Kingsford Smith airport. Shame!

They refused to provide funds to upgrade local sporting fields in Macarthur, to provide female change rooms et cetera, including for Eagle Vale St Andrews Junior Rugby League Football Club at Eschol Park and Minto soccer club at Sarah Redfern Oval, yet they are able to fund golf clubs and rowing clubs et cetera in Liberal electorates. Shame! They refused to provide timely upgrades to the often fatal Appin Road. Instead they piggyback off Labor's advocacy, trickling through the funding in paltry quantities and ensuring that the road is never going to be adequate and is going to remain very dangerous. They refused to provide funding to provide a paediatric intensive care unit at Campbelltown Hospital, despite ample demand for such a service.

They failed to come to the table to defend and protect Campbelltown's uniquely disease-free koala colony. They are still allowing development to occur on koala habitat in south-west Sydney, the closest koala colony to the centre of Sydney. It's a healthy koala colony that's able to move to the south, to Wollongong, to the west, to the Southern Highlands, and also to the Georges River, providing healthy koalas that would provide a koala colony for the future, yet their future is at severe risk because of a lack of funding by the Liberal government. The Liberal environment minister won't even come to my electorate despite multiple requests to view our koala colony, our unique habitat and also the Indigenous sites around the soon to be developed Appin area. It's a great shame and a tragedy that this could all be lost thanks to the Liberal Party's lack of care for the south-west of Sydney.

The priorities of this coalition government are twisted. Communities like mine are being left behind as a result of the priorities of the Morrison government. It's time the coalition began governing for all Australians, not just their friends at the big end of town—not just cherrypicking the winners and the losers. This budget was perhaps one of the most significant in living memory. It was a chance to do the right thing by all Australians. It was a chance for the government to show vision. It was a chance for the government to show us all their credentials as a caring and decent government that governs for all and not just for some. However, they've not moved from their chosen path of trickle-down economics and a laissez-faire attitude to those who are really struggling.

This government have amassed a trillion dollars in debt, yet Macarthur is getting very little to show for it. Similarly, the electorates around Macarthur are not getting the infrastructure they need for this rapidly growing population. This is a population of young families with children, who are the future of our society, yet they're not getting treated properly by this government. I note that the New South Wales state government is able to fund over $70 million to turn a quarry into a park for North Shore residents, yet in Macarthur they're not even able to provide decent watering facilities and decent lighting for some of our playing fields where those who will later go on to represent Australia in a whole range of sports are playing.

This government are unable to fund adequate medical facilities in the south-west of Sydney. We have huge waiting lists, and the waiting lists are blowing out day by day. They've been made worse, of course, by the COVID-19 pandemic, but our waiting lists were already longer than the rest of Sydney's anyway. They are not adequately funding services for children and young families in the health system in terms of providing primary care. Breastfeeding rates are low. There are high instances of nutritional problems, such as iron deficiency and obesity in children, yet this government have shown no vision for child health in the areas that are struggling.

This recession will be longer and worse for this government's failure to invest in areas of need, its failure to fairly distribute infrastructure funding and its consistent attempts to create a class divide. That is what is happening. If one looks at life expectancies, they are worse outside our major cities. The further out of metropolitan areas and into rural and regional areas you go, life expectancies are worse than the centre of Sydney—yet the government is happy for this to continue. Gap costs for accessing specialist care have blown out unbelievably in the last six years, so that in many developing areas of Sydney and in rural and regional areas people cannot afford to pay for high-level specialist care. That an out-of-touch government could find money in a recession to give a subsidy to Rupert Murdoch while blatantly refusing to fund early intervention programs for 400 deaf children in Macarthur is an absolute tragedy. They should be ashamed of it, and they should try and do something now to redress the imbalance.

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