Emma Husar (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's no wonder that people are disillusioned with politics or feel disempowered. Last week, Minister Fletcher gave my residents six days to respond to an RSVP for an attempted consultation about the Western Sydney airport—six days! Mr Fletcher sent me an email at 7:30 at night and expected me to let 110,000 people in my community know that they had just six days to reply and to get their RSVPs together to go to a community meeting. How on earth did he expect me to advertise to 110,000 people in six days so that they could RSVP and go along to a meeting? If this minister was serious about offering the people of my community genuine consultation on that airport, he would open a meeting to all of the public and invite everybody in and hear everybody's concerns. But we know that's just not what he is interested in because he doesn't want to hear how we all know that this plan is flawed.

We constantly hear about how this airport is going to deliver for the people of Western Sydney, how we are going to get all these jobs and this great infrastructure. I can tell you now, Deputy Speaker Hogan, we're not going to get the jobs. Just this week we had Paul O'Sullivan, who is the head of the Western Sydney Airport, come out and say it would be the first digital airport to be ever built. Digital airports—I don't need to tell anyone in here—do not come with jobs for people; they come with jobs for robots and jobs for computers—so, straight up, the argument about the jobs they're creating is flawed. They want us to suck up a 24-hour operational airport, which is completely at odds with what those people who live near the Kingsford Smith Airport have. They want us to suck up 24-hour aircraft noise, and all the additional truck movements that come with a 24-hour operation. They do not want to give us the money for infrastructure. They said they are setting aside $50 million for a 'study' for the rail line, but there's actually no money in this budget to deliver the rail line—the rail line which is going to funnel people from Badgerys Creek to an already crowded, over-burdened and under-pressure T1 line in St Marys.

I'm not surprised that people feel like they don't have a voice and that they don't feel they're empowered to make a change. I held consultations of my own over the weekend at my regular 'coffee with a pollie' and, over the course of that day, at least half the people who came to see me had concerns about this airport. This is in exactly the same vein that the New South Wales government have consulted the people of Castlereagh, Llandilo and Cranebrook over the 1951 corridor that, after 67 years, they decided to change overnight. Those residents were consulted by RMS officials landing on their doorstep with white envelopes for them. If this is the way that the Liberals think you deliver consultation to communities, it is absolutely plain wrong. They need to get out from under their hiding places and come out and talk to real people to understand how their decisions are actually affecting real lives, people's livelihoods, their homes and businesses.