Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I want to firstly acknowledge that many in our community, right across New South Wales, are doing it tough at the moment in the aftermath of the devastating floods that have been occurring over the last few days. As we learnt only recently, we have had a tragic loss of life in north-west Sydney. There has been damage caused to some local homes in my area, and it has been confronting over the last few days to have seen warnings from the SES along very familiar routes that I and many other residents take every day, including warnings by the SES to residents to prepare to evacuate by 3 am, Monday 22 March. I received this warning in the Riverstone, Schofields and Quakers Hill area, along roads that I take every day.

I also want to acknowledge that this has been a very confronting time for our local institutions—in particular, our schools. Across many schools in my community, there has been the option for school to be attended if students are able to, but unfortunately many of the bus services have been cancelled because the bus depot in north-west Sydney was flooded. These schools have had to put up with, unfortunately, the flexibility that had to be applied during COVID. They have taken care to meet the expectations of parents and manage teachers and students during these past couple of days. It could not have been easy, so I want to do a big shout-out to those schools in my local area, including across Schofields, Riverstone and Vineyard. More than 160 schools have been closed across New South Wales due to flooding and severe weather, but I'm very pleased to see that some of them, including Schofields Public School, will now be open tomorrow. That of course is very good news.

I also want to pay very special tribute—and I'm sure my colleague the member for Werriwa will agree with me—to my electorate neighbour just down Old Windsor Road and Richmond Road, the member for Macquarie, Susan Templeman. She isn't in parliament this week, for very obvious reasons. She is being the best local member that she can be. She is out and about in her community lending a hand. With the energy and ferocity that she brings to the role, constituents in the electorate of Macquarie could ask for no-one better. In the case of the member for Macquarie, unfortunately, a year ago parts of her community were being ravaged by bushfires and now we have the other half of her community under water.

I think people need to understand that the majority of the images—at least what I saw on the TV news last night—are in the Hawkesbury, Windsor and Sackville areas of her electorate. You only have to look at her social media posts. She is right there in the middle of it. She's there at the Richmond Club having dinner with the Xie family, who were helicoptered out of their property. She's showing the rows of tractors that were moved up to Don't Worry Oval in Windsor, the highest point in the town. She's there with emergency services personnel making sure people stay off the bridges, including the relatively new Windsor Bridge, which I noticed was underwater. I have every confidence that the member for Macquarie will continue to be the strongest advocate that anyone could wish for in her community, as they hope for a bit of relief. Hopefully that is coming very soon. In the aftermath, I'm sure that she will be there to examine the lessons learnt from disaster management. She'll work with claimants and insurers to ensure fair treatment for those who will be building again.

I want to extend a very special thanks to all of our SES volunteers—and they are volunteers; they do this of their own volition and they do it in very difficult circumstances. I want to note the very many local community groups who've reached out to my office saying that they want to assist not only the volunteers but also those who have been impacted. They are a wide cross-section of our community, be it religious organisations or cultural groups. I want to give a shout-out to just two of them who contacted my office—I'm sure there are many, many more—the Australian Sikh Association and Charity International Australia. We put them in touch with the SES to help feed and assist volunteers and those in need.

As the member for Werriwa will well know, this is exactly what happened at the height of the pandemic: we had local community groups coming forward. With the cooperation of councils, for example, they were given spaces to enable them to assemble hampers for people in need. They did such great outreach, irrespective of culture or religion. It really does bring out the best of humanity. So I want to thank all of those groups, thank our SES and pay very special tribute to the member for Macquarie. Your friends are here. We miss you, but we have been watching you and our very best wishes are with you and your community at this really testing time.

I also want to make a few points, as I have done on countless occasions, it feels like, over the past 10 or so years in this place, about the infrastructure deficit that continues to plague Western Sydney, north-west Sydney and south-west Sydney. As outer metropolitan Sydney continues to grow at a massive rate, it still remains the case that we do not have our fair share when it comes to infrastructure, be it hard infrastructure, if you want to call it that, in terms of roads and other services to support the commute and public transport, or be it other infrastructure such as the best communication services like broadband and mobile coverage in our outer metro areas.

I do want to thank the fourth estate, and in particular The Daily Telegraph. I'm participating in their Best of the West forum on Friday, because it not only serves to highlight that deficit but also puts pressure on all levels government to work together to resolve these very serious issues that arise—I'm sure the member for Werriwa would have very similar issues to me—in terms of health, the commute and education. The things that impact on the quality of life in our communities are those things that they experience every day, be it the disproportionally high rate of tolls that need to be paid every day in order conduct a commute where public transport is simply not an option; or be it parking at local commuter hubs for heavy rail in order to make that journey out of their areas.

Unfortunately, it remains the case that too many jobs are located in areas which are outside these local government areas: outside Blacktown, outside Liverpool, outside Cumberland. So it is still not an option for so many of our local community to work, study and live in the same local area. This needs to change. It is not going to change overnight. However, we have seen work patterns change, and not everything will go back to the way it was. There will be a new normal, in terms of working from home. But, of course, this requires access to the highest-quality broadband services in order for that to happen—in order for students to be able to study from home and in order for those people for whom working from home is an option to be able to do that.

Again, this is not some chip-on-the-shoulder mentality. The reality is this—and I'll highlight some quotes from the growth in Blacktown: the annual change in the estimated resident population in 2019 in Blacktown was 2.29 per cent. The rate of change in New South Wales was 1.37 per cent. The rate of change in Australia overall was 1.53 per cent. You can see that even in one local government area in west and north-west Sydney the population growth far exceeds that of New South Wales and that of Australia. That will not go down when we are having more housing moving into the area around the Western Sydney airport and we are having more housing releases happening in areas of mine that were once farmland, where you can drive through it one week and the next week there are rows and rows of new houses being built.

I welcome new housing going into our areas, but what needs to be remembered is that you have to have the corresponding infrastructure in order for these new residents to enjoy an adequate quality of life. That includes education. It includes building schools where, in a matter of a couple of years, you don't have demountables taking up entire parking areas or kids' playgrounds. That is exactly what is happening around the new areas of The Ponds in my electorate. It's completely unacceptable. It's also completely unacceptable that we still have school areas of such high disadvantage that teachers are running breakfast clubs in the morning just to ensure that their kids are able to start school with some food in their bellies. It highlights the lack of forward planning that has been happening at a state level for quite some time in New South Wales.

We talk about announcement versus delivery. Nowhere could this be more true than this New South Wales government when it comes to issues such as providing adequate education and transport opportunities. They've promised time and again that they would deliver a multistorey commuter car park at Schofields Station. We have learnt that not only was it not delivered by the end of last year, as promised; they're now proposing an at-grade car park. Bear in mind, for those who don't know, Schofields is smack-bang in the middle of what I just described in terms of the explosion in growth. People need to travel outside of their communities primarily in order to access work and study.

The other thing that I have highlighted, not once, not twice—this will, in fact, be my third time highlighting it—is the disparity when it comes to health services in our local area. A week ago I raised in parliament a national scandal, where we have had six babies die unexpectedly in Blacktown Hospital over the past two-or-so years. I was born in that hospital. The residents of the Greater Blacktown area, for which Blacktown Hospital is the only public hospital, deserve to have confidence that they will have the same level of care for themselves and their families as anyone who lives on to the North Shore or in the eastern suburbs. I made representations late last year to the minister, seeking an urgent briefing about what was happening here. I don't come here as a complete novice. I'm previous non-executive director of the Western Sydney area health service, so there are a couple of things I understand about the pressures and about hospital administration. I didn't receive a reply for a month from the New South Wales government in response to that request. I didn't receive a response from the minister. I had a response from his understudy basically saying nothing that we didn't already know.

Call me crazy, but I'm just saying that, if a local MP gets up for the third time in parliament and raises the issue of the inadequate services being provided at Blacktown hospital and the disgrace of having parents go home without a live baby, in unexpected circumstances, you'd think you'd want to contact them. You'd think you'd want to contact them. But, no—nothing from this minister or this government. And I remain very ready for whatever is needed to be done, whatever advocacy is needed to be done. I have met with the nurses and midwives—nurses and midwives who decide, that is, make a conscious decision, to spend their shifts being dehydrated because they can't even afford the time to go to the toilet on their shifts. It is absolutely outrageous. They've got nurses in very high-end obstetrics who are not properly trained being required to perform tasks which they shouldn't be. But there is simply no-one else to do this task.

This type of administration cannot go on. It cannot go on. Again, I say to the Minister for Health in New South Wales: 'You need to be transparent about this. You need to be open with the Blacktown community about what's going on. And, while you're at it, maybe you can deliver on your promise to deliver a new hospital at Rouse Hill.'

You have to go back to 2015 for this, when the then Premier Mike Baird announced a $300 million hospital at Rouse Hill. Four years later, it was announced it required some land to construct a substantial hospital. As at 1 March this year, the land proposed has still not been purchased and studies for the site have stalled. Talk about all promise and no delivery when it comes to health services! This is in one of the fastest-growing regions of Sydney, if not in New South Wales and if not in Australia. It is high time. I will be raising these issues and many others at The Daily Telegraph's forum on Friday, and I thank them for their interest in promoting the needs of Western Sydney residents and a forum by which these issues can be ventilated, because, quite frankly, it is not good enough. The people of west and north-west Sydney are not going to tolerate it for a minute longer.

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