Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As we enter the year 2026 and students go back to school and parents return to work, one thing is constantly discussed with me across my electorate and that is how much harder life has got under this Labor government and how much more expensive it is. As we know, when Labor spends, you pay. Across my electorate, families are working harder just to afford the basic essentials as costs go up and up under this government. Insurance costs are up 38 per cent, energy bills are up 38 per cent, rent is up 22 per cent and health is up 18 per cent. In my shadow portfolio, education, the cost since Labor came to government is up 17 per cent. It's up 5.4 per cent this year, well above the broader inflation figure of 3.8 per cent. Child care is up 11.2 per cent. Grocery prices across the board are up 16 per cent.

These figures are shocking and they have real impacts on families and family budgets. A local in Waitara recently wrote to me saying their apartment strata fees have more than doubled in two years. Their council charges and water and electricity costs have gone up as well. What we're seeing now in my electorate is families having to make very difficult decisions as the school year starts and the club sport year starts. Do they buy their child school shoes or do they register them at the local sporting club to play a winter sport? This is Berowra. This isn't one of the most economically strong areas of our country, nor is it one of the most economically challenged areas. It is a Middle Australian area. If families are struggling in my community, they're struggling so much more in other places.

Not only has Labor's management of the economy made people's lives more difficult; Labor's failure to properly invest in infrastructure is also having a very deleterious effect on people in my community. New Line Road is the worst bottleneck in my community. It connects Pennant Hills and Pennant Hills Road through Cherrybrook up to Dural and up and out to the semi-rural part of my electorate. For 50 years, people have been waiting for New Line Road to be widened. My in-laws built their dream home there in the early 1980s and were told that the widening of New Line Road was some six months away. Well, people are still waiting today.

When I first became the member for Berowra, I secured $10 million for the planning for the widening of the road. New Line Road is a state road, but sometimes when the federal government puts money on the table it pushes the state into action—and, indeed, it did. The state government matched that money. This was a Liberal state government. Then, in its last budget, the Perrottet government, with Matt Kean as Treasurer, committed $77 million for the widening of New Line Road between Hastings Road and Purchase Road, the main bottleneck. But, when the Minns government came to office, they shelved the project. They shelved the project that our community has been waiting half a century to bring about. We're fed up with it. It's why I've started a petition to put pressure on the Minns government—and the Albanese government, if the Minns government won't find the funds—to widen this very important road and improve the bottleneck. It's so important that New Line Road is widened, particularly as the state government has announced plans to insert an extra 9,500 dwellings around the Cherrybrook metro. How can you put more dwellings around a metro where the road infrastructure already is not keeping up? It's vital that before a sod is turned in Cherrybrook for the metro redevelopment that important infrastructure upgrades, like the widening of New Line Road, occur. Otherwise, the quality of life of people in our community will just continue to decline.

People have waited long enough. It's time for action. We are going to continue to put the pressure, as I have done right across my last decade in parliament, on the state government to do its job and the Albanese government to back them in to fund the important widening of this road that not only affects the suburbs I mentioned but is a bottleneck for people in Kenthurst and Annangrove and the suburbs in the neighbouring electorates, which are undergoing their own redevelopments and their own increases in density and population. There is nothing wrong with building more homes. I obviously support the idea of more Australians buying a home in my community, but we cannot build more homes when the infrastructure for existing homes is already failing. New Line Road's widening is a must, and I urge everyone to sign my petition and to amplify the voice of our community to ensure that the Minns government and the Albanese government hear what we need to do to improve the situation across those suburbs.

At the redistribution just before the last election, I was privileged to begin representing the suburb of Epping. Most of the suburb of Epping is in the Berowra electorate. Epping is a wonderful and diverse part of the community. It has a very significant Chinese Australian community. It is a community that has gone from single-dwelling houses to 20-storey apartment towers. Again, the infrastructure in Epping has not kept up with the growth in population there. The Epping train station is now a major train station. It has the metro, it has the northern line, and it has the express line going from Newcastle through to the city. It is a major transport hub. It is a hub for major businesses near Macquarie Park. It is a hub for people going to Macquarie University. It has a town centre that is really struggling. It's struggling because people cannot get a park. They cannot get a park to go to Coles. They cannot get a park to see the doctor or the optometrist, to take their kids to tutoring or to go to one of the restaurants there. It's affecting the business community. It's affecting the quality of life. At the end of last year I doorknocked around Epping, and, again and again, the issue of more parking for Epping around the station was one that was raised with me. It's all very well to build more of these towers across Epping, but there's no point building the towers if nobody can actually shop at Coles there and if nobody can see the doctor. It just diminishes the quality of life.

The state government has this bizarre policy when they allow people to develop new dwellings that you don't have to provide a carpark for every bedroom you've got there. If you had to provide a carpark for every bedroom you've got, you wouldn't have as many problems in relation to parking, but we don't. So we need the parking situation addressed, and I call on people in my community to sign the petition to get more public parking in Epping so we can make Epping and its town centre workable and liveable again for the residents and those people who need to visit Epping.

I want to turn to the issue of the Australia Post decision to close the post office at Pennant Hills. This has been a body blow to the Pennant Hills community. There are an increasingly large number of older Australians in Pennant Hills who've moved into the retirement villages around those areas. There are people who shop at the excellent Pennant Hills shops there with the IGA, Harris Farm and a range of speciality shops. There are an increasing number of businesses in Pennant Hills, including Excelsia University College, which opened up at the beginning of this year. McDonald's headquarters in Thornleigh used to have, as its post box, the Pennant Hills post office, but when Australia Post decided to dispense with a post office in Pennant Hills, it's really left that community bereft, and my office knows it as well because we used that post office to service our constituents.

This is now a real matter of which business in Pennant Hills are suffering. We know that Pennant Hills is due for redevelopment. I welcome a redevelopment of Pennant Hills. But all of these things are factors that Australia Post should be taking into account in determining whether to maintain services or not. Australia Post will not even provide for a licensed post office. We've written to the CEO. We launched a petition, which now has over 1,200 signatures, which I gave to the Minister for Communications, yet there's been no action on restoring postal services to Australia Post. I've put in a freedom-of-information application to find out not only what the status of decisions about the future of the Pennant Hills post office is but what Australia Post's plan to close post offices in other parts of my electorate and indeed other parts of Australia is, because I believe Australia Post has a secret plan to close post offices right across the country that they're not coming clean about with Australians. We need to expose this, because today it's Pennant Hills. Tomorrow it'll be other communities. Australia Post services are absolutely vital. They're particularly vital for older Australians, they're particularly vital for the civility of our society, and they're particularly vital for people who are trying to access services. So I put Australia Post and its well-paid CEO and its well-paid board on notice that we in the Berowra community will not stomach the closure of any more post offices, and we intend to expose Australia Post's plan, right across the country, to close post offices and diminish the services that Australians want.

Unfortunately, life under the Albanese government has got harder, whether it is because of the cost of living, the reduction of services or the imposition of a lower standard of living because of a failure to invest in important infrastructure.