Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There was a story in The Daily Telegraph this week that said that the New South Wales government is going to put money into roads in the state budget which will be delivered next week. I hope that this includes funding for Stacey Street in Bankstown. As I have said before in this place, Stacey Street is the slowest road in Sydney outside the CBD. This week the Canterbury-Bankstown Express newspaper reported that Roads and Maritime Services is now doing drilling and coring as well as survey work to determine what the fix needs to be to make this road work better. At peak hour it is a car park. The solution here is three lanes in each direction from the M5 Motorway through to the Hume Highway, and real money needs to be allocated in this budget to make sure that we fix Stacey Street.

We also need real money to fix Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital. Bankstown hospital has been in the media recently for all the wrong reasons. Almost a year ago nitrous oxide was incorrectly administered to newborn babies instead of oxygen. One child, tragically, passed away. Another child has been left with permanent brain damage. As someone who has just become a parent in the last couple of months, I cannot imagine the grief and the pain that the parents of those little babies must be going through. We have got to get to the bottom of this and make sure that these sorts of mistakes never happen again.

There are other things that also have to happen at Bankstown hospital. Anyone who has ever visited the hospital will know that parking is a nightmare. There are not enough parking spaces—nowhere near enough. What it means is that all the local streets around the hospital are always chock-a-block with cars, from people parking there to get to the hospital. People are also having to walk a long way to get to the hospital, which means that sometimes people are late for appointments or outpatients sometimes decide not to keep their appointments.

The emergency department also needs a major overhaul. It is bursting at the seams. The waiting area is always full. There are not enough beds in the emergency department, and it is only getting busier. This means that ambulances are often redirected to other hospitals. The emergency department needs to be expanded and reconfigured.

The city of Bankstown is not shrinking. Like most of Sydney and most of Australia, it is only getting bigger, and the state government has said that, over the next 20 years, Bankstown's population will increase by 50 per cent. If that is going to happen then we do need to expand our hospital to meet growing demand and need.

The state budget is next Tuesday, and I call on the state government of New South Wales to fix Stacey Street and to fix Bankstown hospital. If you are serious about helping the people of Bankstown then you need to make sure that we have got the services we need and deserve. That means fixing Stacey Street and fixing Bankstown hospital.