Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak about Showground Road, a road of great importance to residents in my electorate. This week we were privileged to hear about the allocation by the New South Wales government of $1 million towards the funding of Showground Road in Castle Hill. It might surprise the House to hear me praise the New South Wales government, Mr Deputy Speaker—and I can see you looking at me with shock—but it is a welcome development that $1 million has been allocated to such an important arterial road in my electorate.

It is that case that my electorate has the highest rate of cars per household of any federal electorate in Australia. It is not something we are proud of. We also have the highest rate of couples with dependent children and we are one of the fastest growing regions in Australia, which mean that infrastructure, particularly transport infrastructure, is of vital importance. In noting this development this week, I want to congratulate in particular the member for Castle Hill, Mr Michael Richardson, who has made an enormous contribution over many years in highlighting the problems with Showground Road. Showground Road links the Castle Hill central business district and Windsor Road. Over 45,000 vehicles use this road every day. It is appalling to note that this vital road link in my electorate which is only 1.2 kilometres long has a single lane each way.

It is a great shame that in modern Australia we cannot build better infrastructure. In a major city like Sydney, infrastructure is well behind schedule and billion-dollar costs are associated with the fixing it. It is the case that when a federal government is proposing to spend infrastructure money and when we have a Minister for Infrastructure and Transport whose electorate is in New South Wales, we ought to have a better understanding and appreciation of how vital infrastructure is to a major city like Sydney. One of my great laments about this federal Labor government—the past one and this current one—is that the infrastructure minister has not allocated money to Sydney, the biggest city in Australia, for infrastructure spending. Infrastructure is such a problem in our state.

The New South Wales government has a roads budget of about $4.7 billion that includes roads like the Pacific Highway and serious arterial and country roads all across the state. We are spending so much on a national broadband network, yet there are projects that affect the daily lives of my constituents, tens of thousands of them going begging, when really the money could be better spent on vitally needed transport infrastructure.

We have received this $1 million for survey and design planning. It is a welcome development. I want to note the contribution of Michael Richardson. He has worked hard with all levels of government in my electorate—whether it be local government or state government, or indeed the Queensland Investment Corporation that is proposing a major redevelopment of the centre of Castle Hill—to have a rethink about how to fund infrastructure, how to ensure that everybody makes a contribution to upgrading the infrastructure at the time it is done.

One of the great things I like about suburbs in Perth is that they are rolling out infrastructure—train lines and roads—with the suburbs as they go. We all know that Sydney has not been planned in the way it ought to have been, and growth has been allowed. Special infrastructure levies have been charged on properties in my electorate for many years and infrastructure has not been returned to my electorate in kind for those extra charges. My electorate pay a high rates of tolls to and from the city on private motorways. We have no problem with private motorways as long as they work. When they do not work and tolls are so high, and you do not get value from them, infrastructure and Sydney planning have failed.

In an electorate with the highest rate of car dependency in Australia, in one of the fastest growing communities in Australia and with the highest rate of couples with dependent children, every adult and every family in Mitchell has a car. We do need money for infrastructure funding and I welcome the New South Wales government initiating this planning process. It is long overdue. However, they have missed this opportunity: just 1.2 kilometres of road, a small thing in the scheme of things that governments do—a thing that is done by other governments in places all around the world. It is time for reform of how we do infrastructure in New South Wales and Australia because we should be able to build 1.2 kilometres of road much cheaper than what they have planned and in a much shorter time frame.