Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to take this opportunity to talk up beautiful Port Macquarie, a rapidly expanding regional city that deserves acknowledgement of its recent accelerated growth and future potential. Port Macquarie has always been a tourism hotspot. If you haven't been there, you should go. But, in recent years, more and more of its once seasonal visitors have opted to stay permanently, with a growth rate of 17.3 per cent in Port Macquarie west since the start of 2021. It's not hard to see why. Not only is it a coastal city filled with natural beauty but it continues to enhance and expand its employment opportunities and services, evolving to cater to both young and old.

Once upon a time, it was heralded as a retirement capital, but now it's attracting more and more families than it ever has before, and it's easy to see why. It's because we have some of the best public schools and impressive independent schools like the Nature School, the Steiner school and St Columba. The range and choice on offer certainly puts it at the top of the list in New South Wales. That's coupled with the state-of-the-art Charles Sturt University campus that is well on its way to doubling its intake by 2030, and the University of New South Wales clinical campus at the base hospital as well.

Yet, despite these obvious indicators of accelerated, sustained growth, the congestion chaos at this burgeoning regional city's most critical entry points continues to grow worse with every passing month, due to a lack of care and investment by this Labor government and the state Labor government. The Wrights Road and the Lake Road roundabouts leading to the health and education precincts—in fact, those that I've just referred to—have long been flagged as the worst areas and the most dangerous bottlenecks, impacting not only commuters but, more importantly, ambulances attempting to get to the hospital. That's why under the coalition, prior to 2022, we allocated $5 million to settle a feasibility study for those areas. But, with the change of government, that funding decision was reversed, and, despite continued, unified calls by local, state and federal representatives, nothing has happened.

So, on behalf of my communities, I'm asking the state and federal governments: why are you ignoring the needs of a rapidly expanding regional city with so much to offer? We deserve so much more.

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