Mr Hat
Personally I see airports as a vital piece of infrastructure, Farmer Bloggs coming in from Moree on a Dash, should have the same rights as Holiday maker Bloggs on a jet from Cairns, to use SY airport.
I won't go into the politics, there are far too many people making an industry out of that conundrum.
I read (somewhere) the other day that there are very few major airports that don't have parallel runways, we just happened to 'blessed' with a few.
Some of the cavalry have arrived to discuss points on this topic. I would urge any pilot who is interested to visit a centre. We get the rare frustrated comment about what is going on.
As regards to RTA, under radar we have a fairly good idea about who is trying to make good their RTA and who is taking the liberty of bullsh!tting. The vast majority of domestic pilots are endeavouring to get it right, and thank you. We also have some internationals, especially in the morning, who we watch like hawks. The SY flow are also adjusting the sequence based on the actions of the odd domestic and some internationals.
The joy of having some international carrier advise 3 minutes (15-20 miles) from the feeder fix that they are negative PRM, relaying this to the SY flow, and dealing with the fallout and revision to the RTAs is an interesting experience that I recommend to no-one.
As others have said, the sequence is a dynamic beast, the jet out of Canberra gets away with a 25 minute flight time. The jet out of Port Macquarie had a 37 minute flight time and held for 50+ minutes on Monday due to storms. As we sat there with 4 holding stacks going, I mused why the hell did they depart? Shouldn't someone have told them?
I see some press blurb about a project with lots of shiny suits patting themselves on the back because the SY-KLAX flight got unrestricted climb to cruising and direct tracking thereby saving the airline XX tonnes of fuel, I think we try to do that everyday.
I then look at MAESTRO as everyone is getting held into SY for 10+ minutes due to noise sharing, times that by the 15 aircraft that I can see, and think there's that fuel and then a fair bit more, plus all the poor buggers that are waiting for Farmer Bloggs from Moree, and Holiday maker Bloggs from Cairns to land, so they can pay their parking fees and get going. 40 on the Dash, 110 from Cairns. Thats a fair bit of excess parking, even given that not everyone is there to pick up just one punter.