Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I extend my congratulations to two major businesses that have opened up in the last couple of weeks in the Chifley electorate that are providing hundreds of jobs to locals. To Costco, I extend my congratulations to CEO Patrick Noonan and all the team there. It opened up at Marsden Park, creating 300 jobs there, allowing people who live in the local area to work locally as well. It's been tremendous to see them open up their operations on the site of the Sydney Business Park. The week before, IKEA opened. It was fantastic to see one of the largest IKEA distribution centres in the country opening up in the electorate of Chifley at Marsden Park, again at Sydney Business Park. It was a huge announcement. It is great to see those 200 jobs join the 300 jobs that have now opened up down the road at Costco. I'm proud to say 75 per cent of the jobs there, as a result of efforts we had undertaken to make sure we could maximise job growth in the area, went to locals. Forty-four went to people from low socioeconomic backgrounds or kids from Aboriginal backgrounds.

This is huge. Sixty thousand jobs will be created by the Sydney Business Park project alone in the course of the decade. This is the thermonuclear version of a jobs generator right in our backyard. It is a fantastic thing to see. It opened up because the infrastructure was there. The M7 has allowed the Sydney Business Park, where Costco and IKEA are located, to operate. There are a lot of other firms, too, that are taking advantage of well-placed infrastructure. Getting these jobs in place is a priority, as 150,000 people are expected to live in Marsden Park. We need to make sure that the jobs are there, supported by good infrastructure.

The other big infrastructure project is the M9. The M9 will be crucial; otherwise, we will have traffic jams as far as the eye can see, and an impact on local job creation because the infrastructure isn't there. The New South Wales government announced just $2 million for the M9 project in their last budget. They're clearly not serious about this. This project needs to go ahead to unlock business development. We know hundreds of thousands of residents are forced to go east to work every day. But back in July 2015 the project manager for the M9 corridor told local media, 'A short list of corridor options will be presented to the public by 2015.' That was two years ago! The last newsletter for the M9 corridor on the Transport for NSW planning page is dated 2015. We need this investment in this motorway now. We need to see things happening now. Otherwise people will be paying very soon for the lack of infrastructure. We need that motorway and the challenge is: will it be a motorway without a toll bucket on it?