Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you had build a new piece of infrastructure—in fact, probably the biggest single piece of infrastructure you can imagine—the worst way to do it would be to look at the rules that other, similar, nearby pieces of infrastructure have and then throw them out. That is exactly what the government did when they proposed Western Sydney airport at Badgerys Creek. They looked at the rules that had been hard-fought for by residents and local members in the east, the inner west, the south and the north shore to protect their communities from excessive impacts from aircraft and they said, 'We are going to do exactly the opposite—no curfew, no cap on hourly flight numbers and no flight sharing.'

I understand the economic attractiveness of these policy settings for the airlines and for the operator of the airport, but, as the local member, I do not as not accept and my constituents do not accept the social, health and environmental consequences of them for the Blue Mountains and for the rest of Western Sydney. A year after we saw the draft EIS for this plan, with 100 per cent of incoming flights merging over the unsuspecting town of Blaxland in the lower Blue Mountains 24 hours a day, there have been some concessions. But unfortunately the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport's press release about changes is not adequately reflected in the final EIS. It fails to lock in the policy commitments made by the minister of no merge points across the mountains and no night-time flights over residential areas.

The EIS still talks about potential merge points and the head-to-head night-time operations is merely a preferred operating mode. It fails to adequately address environmental impacts by pushing all serious consideration and studies into the future, after the airport is approved—the flight paths, the air quality, the impacts on World Heritage, the effects of bird and bat strikes and where they will find suitable land banking sites to compensate for the loss of Cumberland Plain. And it is important to note that on the 16th anniversary of World Heritage listing, the EIS fails to acknowledge that UNESCO only gave World Heritage listing to the Greater Blue Mountains after the Howard government abandoned plans for an airport at Badgerys Creek.

It is also worth noting that a key argument in favour of the airport is that it creates jobs but the jobs analysis in the EIS ignores increased automation, robotics and artificial intelligence when estimating jobs. It uses a figure higher than the current employment rate at Kingsford Smith to estimate jobs numbers for a Western Sydney airport. and we pay a huge financial and social cost for those jobs. If you operate on the assumption that an EIS is a process for assessing environmental impacts of a development then this fails to address the necessary issues, and the airport should not proceed on this basis.