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Albanese does nothing on Sydney Airports

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Albanese does nothing on Sydney Airports

Old 11th Apr 2012, 14:48
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Albanese kick-starts airport at Wilton

THE federal government's chief transport bureaucrat has written to Sydney Airport Corporation requesting talks on a second airport in Sydney, the first legal step in planning for a second site, probably at Wilton, south-west of Campbelltown.

Under the terms of the airport's 2002 privatisation, Sydney Airport has the ''first right of refusal'' in any process to find a company to develop and operate another airport in the Sydney basin.

In a clear sign the Gillard government is serious about pressing ahead with a second airport despite opposition from Sydney Airport and the NSW government, the head of the federal Transport Department, Mike Mrdak, wrote to Sydney Airport Corporation's chairman, Max Moore-Wilton, on March 2 requesting talks about the formal consultation process required under the 2002 Sydney Airport Corporation share sale agreement

Read more: Albanese kick-starts airport at Wilton
You reckon?
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Old 11th Apr 2012, 22:53
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The government is just 'creating activity' whereby they will spend millions of dollars waste a few years to print a report saying that Wilton is unsuitable. This enables Albanese to say he is doing something and they can procrastinate for another 2 years.

By then Albanese will be out of office and the whole circus can start again with a Liberal Federal Government.
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Old 12th Apr 2012, 05:05
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In a clear sign the Gillard government is serious about pressing ahead with a second airport
Oh no, please say it aint so! And how much of the long suffering taxpayers money is going to be p****d up against the wall this time?

Labor has not managed to do anything successfully so far (except waste money) since they got in so I think that the odds of actually getting something done are so small as to be non existent.
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Old 12th Apr 2012, 06:03
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Thanks for that nev and perky,the Howard guvmint did nothing for 10 years except give away airfields, you blokes recon this mob have another 7 years or so of total inactivity before they can compete with lil johnny?
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Old 12th Apr 2012, 08:51
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It's a failure of the system. Any party at any given point in time is going to lose votes if they build a new airport in Sydney.

However at the same time it is the duty of the government to govern and provide for such thing as airports/roads etc.

So as a result they just procrastinate looking like they are doing something whilst doing nothing as it is a lose/lose scenario for any government.

Meanwhile Sydney starts falling apart due to no decisive action being taken.

In reality Sandilands article is probably right on the money. Let Sydney fail miserably then start again from scratch.
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Old 13th Apr 2012, 23:28
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Now the resistance at Wilton is getting organised.

It may be another rumour but the community is steeling itself to fight.
Growing up in Hurstville and Carlton, Philip Parker learnt early in life the consequences of proximity to an airport. A former geography teacher, he's now a man of the cloth, preaching the faith to the good Anglican parishioners of Picton and Wilton, but he recalls clearly speculation in his primary school years that a second Sydney airport was imminent. Reverend Parker is now 57.
Wilton is a village 80 kilometres south-west of Sydney, just off the Hume Highway and near where weekend travellers play spot the parachutists gliding to terra firma. It's home to a few hundred souls seemingly content with relative insignificance but now confronted by two great and incompatible challenges to their rustic anonymity.
They can be swamped by the engine thunder of jets departing and arriving at a new Sydney airport the federal government wants to build nearby or they can be enveloped by urban encroachment - housing estates projected to ultimately fill this ideal slice of city outskirts with a population the equal of Canberra's. Getting neither is high on the wish-list, but not on the cards.
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The mayor of Wollondilly, Col Mitchell, right, with his deputy, Luke Johnson. Photo: Sahlan Hayes
''Discussion of an airport here has been going on so long that people take it with a grain of salt,'' says Parker. Until it reaches the next level - a government go-ahead - Parker suspects community rumblings will remain a hum. ''There's more emphasis on urban sprawl and how that affects the local area, because that's real. The airport thing is ethereal; it comes and goes.''
It's not ennui; more a case of ''we'll believe it when we see it''. And until then, leave us alone. Make no mistake: people of the southern Macarthur don't want a major airport in their backyard, but they suspect talk of it will go the way of decades of similar speculation.
Talk of war, so far at least, is dominated by local politicians reading the pulse. The Wollondilly state MP, Jai Rowell, said an airport would be built ''over my dead body'' because his constituents ''did not sign up for this''. The federal MP, Alby Schultz, agrees. Based on constituent feedback alone, he said, he was ''totally opposed'' to a Wilton airport.

Philip Parker. Photo: Sahlan Hayes
Leading the local charge will be a campaign co-ordinated by the councils of Wollondilly (based on Picton), Campbelltown and Camden. Wollondilly is pressing its neighbours to contribute to a $100,000 fighting fund.
''There is no room for compromise on the issue of a second airport in south-west or western Sydney and we will fight this issue wholeheartedly to the end,'' their mayors, Col Mitchell, Anoulack Chanthivong and Greg Warren respectively, said in a joint statement after a meeting a month ago.
''The residents of the Macarthur region must not be penalised in terms of their health and wellbeing, their lifestyle opportunities, their access to future housing, as well as employment and economic development opportunities, under any circumstance.''
But these goals are open to compromise regardless of the airport. The addition of tens of thousands of homes over the next 30 years, if developers get their way, would alter lifestyle options irretrievably. Like an echo of Badgerys Creek, where housing growth frustrated airport planners with political and environmental headaches, housing estates already are knocking at Wilton's gate.
And with the state government hoping to rezone in June the land for housing, there's every sign Macquarie Street will try to stymie the airport at every turn.
Lend Lease's Bingara Gorge, a manicured golfing estate adjacent to the old Wilton village, got off to a poor start with a launch in 2008 but has a tenth of its projected 3500 population.
At the invitation of the state government, developers have nominated 29,000 sites in Wollondilly, and the developer Lang Walker has indicated plans to open 60,000 sites between Wilton and Appin over the next 30 years.
The consequences on lifestyle, underwritten by the three-council pact, already are occupying locals. Then there's the question of whether rejection of a $3 billion airport, with many thousands of jobs, is consistent with enhanced employment and economic opportunity.
''But wouldn't these jobs be created somewhere else, too?'' Mitchell responded. ''Put the airport where people want it - Newcastle or Goulburn. Jobs would be mostly for imported people anyway. We're happy the way we are.''
The airport option has come and gone many times for Wilton. It was around first when Mitchell was Wollondilly mayor a decade ago. It has popped up over the years as other sites have risen and fallen by the wayside, as happened to Galston in Sydney's north-west. Hissing voters in the federal seat of Parramatta so annoyed Gough Whitlam during campaigning for a 1973 byelection (won by Philip Ruddock) that he turned on his audience and thundered: ''And you've got Galston.'' Of course, it never came to pass.
Now, however, federal government enthusiasm for Wilton (and the willingness of the Transport and Infrastructure Minister, Anthony Albanese, to wage a public brawl with the determinedly resistant NSW Premier, Barry O'Farrell) has raised the site to its highest profile yet.
A Wilton airport is no foregone conclusion, not least because of the miserable stop-start history of a second Sydney basin airport and because the federal Labor government is unlikely to be around to prosecute the case for Wilton beyond next year.
O'Farrell pledged before his election a year ago not to ''dump'' aircraft noise on the people of western Sydney, where Liberals went on to win in landslides. But he is under pressure to relent, not just from business, from his own MPs affected by existing aircraft noise and from those devising his 20-year infrastructure plan for NSW, but from federal colleagues likely to have a big say in the next government.
The shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, for instance, branded as absurd O'Farrell's preference for a $10 billion to $25 billion fast train to an expanded Canberra airport.
Wilton was in the mix until the Hawke government chose Badgerys Creek as the airport site and began acquiring 1700 hectares between Liverpool and Penrith in 1986. It was still second fiddle to Badgerys Creek when the joint federal-state review reported last month that the capacity of Kingsford Smith airport would be exhausted by 2030 and that government had just five years to begin construction of a second airport. ''If Badgerys Creek is ruled out,'' the review said in a 3200-page report, ''Wilton is the next best site and processes should be put in train to secure the site and undertake the full environmental assessment and airport planning processes required to protect and prepare the site for future development.''
Mitchell says: ''We got fired up when running second to Badgerys Creek. This time the fight steps up.''
Wollondilly shire had 10,000 people when Mitchell arrived as a council bureaucrat. Now, it's 45,000 and the council is keen to co-operate with state government plans to open its space to thousands of new housing blocks. White-collar commuters know just how difficult is the task of making a Wilton airport viable. The M5 is the main link to the city - and is probably Sydney's worst performing road - and the nearest commuter trains are up to an hour away.
And without state co-operation, the Commonwealth would need to compulsorily acquire hundreds of hectares of water catchment reserve, much of it forest, for clearing. Would Labor want a brawl over Sydney water security and tree protection? The Wollondilly end takes heart from challenges confronting the Wilton proposal, particularly the denial of essential state services - fast public transport, road access, water, electricity and planning - implied in the O'Farrell stance.
''The state government is going to say no,'' said Mitchell, hoping that might be the end of it. If it was only that simple.
There is formal process of government (co-operation undoubtedly would make the Commonwealth task easier) and reality. How might a state government ignore the demands of a big slab of its biggest city by turning its back on relief from unsustainable urban pressure? An airport reality would suck the most reluctant state government into its vortex. We're no closer to a verdict, therefore.
''We could still be arguing this in 10 years time,'' says Mitchell.
And he might just be right.


Read more: Airport can go fly, says Wilton
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Old 14th Apr 2012, 17:12
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Sydney must have second airport: Albanese v Frequent flyers, eternal suckers

Sydney airport is full and all the tinkering in the world won't change that, federal Infrastructure and Transport Minister Anthony Albanese says.
Mr Albanese says a new report, the most comprehensive study of Sydney's airport needs ever undertaken, makes absolutely clear that a second airport is needed sooner rather than later.


He says the limitations on Sydney airport are already hurting the economy and by 2035, the cost to national GDP of turning away flights will be $6 billion, and nearly six times more by 2060.


Proposals for a second Sydney airport have been discussed for some 30 years, with a number of possible locations considered, but it has been persistently deferred because of the high cost and difficulty.
Mr Albanese says Sydney Kingsford Smith airport was built in an age when aviation was new and planes were small and few.
In comparison, Tullamarine in Melbourne is more than twice the size of Kingsford Smith while Brisbane airport is three times the size.


"The uncomfortable fact, and it is one that can't be ignored, is that Kingsford

Smith Airport is full. All the tinkering in the world won't change that. Nothing will make that reality go away," he wrote in an opinion piece sent to media.
"Passenger numbers will more than double to 87 million by 2035 and double again by 2060. There is no way Kingsford Smith can absorb this growth."
Mr Albanese said doing nothing was already costing the Australian economy.
In 2000, half of all Australia's international flights were through Sydney but that had now dropped to 41 per cent while Melbourne's international traffic had grown by nearly 10 per cent.


A failure to increase Sydney's aviation capacity through a second airport would be a handbrake on future productivity, Mr Albanese said.
This month's report, prepared jointly by the NSW and federal governments, made absolutely clear that Sydney needed a new airport sooner rather than later, he said.


"This issue must be beyond short-term politics. It needs a mature bipartisan approach. Sydney is our gateway to the nation and the world. This joint report shows beyond doubt, we can afford to ignore these facts no longer."
Albo, he's really got a bee in his bonet all of a sudden, then this, and all on the same day....

Frequent flyers, eternal suckers




As you are by now doubtless aware, we forgot to build another airport. Which is why Anthony Albanese is poking around Wilton and Barry O'Farrell is doing some back-of-the-envelope work based on Canberra Airport, a superfast train and the issuance of personal jet-packs.*


In the meantime, despite the ACCC's polite annual reminders that NSW has the most overpriced and unsatisfactory airport in Australia, we continue to put up with it. Why is that?


My theory is that the entire experience of air travel is a conspiracy of petty humiliations, designed subtly to erode the self-esteem of its human clients, who might otherwise rise up as a mob and burn the airport down, or at least point-blank refuse to stow their tray tables appropriately.

From the moment you arrive, the airport wants you to know exactly what it thinks of you. Its character assessment is utterly brutal. Here's what it is, in essence: ''Hello, loser. You're a LOSER. You know what? I think you are such a sucker that you will pay me $23 to park in this shed for an hour and a half. Or maybe stay until tomorrow! That'll be $112. Loser.'

Read more: Frequent flyers, eternal suckers
What a giggle...
.
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Old 15th Apr 2012, 01:38
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but it has been persistently deferred because of the high cost and difficulty.
Right there ladies and gentlemen. Clearly the implication is that it is too hard.
Perhaps the longer we leave it the easier and cheaper it will become. Complete lack of testicular fortitude on the part of those who wish to be called our leaders.
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Old 15th Apr 2012, 20:29
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I am trying to remember but was there not some agreement that when Sydney airport was privatized that if a second airport was built in the sydney basin the purchasers of Sydney airport would receive a stupid amount of monies as compensation for loss of business.

Can that be the reason why Canberra and Wilton are so popular with our leaders?
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Old 17th Apr 2012, 12:28
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Its all quite simple really. You will have all observed that this crap comes up every few years or so, generally to take our attention away from the failings of the present Federal/State Govt. Right now the Feds could not win a camel race, or indeed run a sausage sizzle, so its time to put a few kicks into a State Liberal Govt, and protest at their inertness regarding a second SYD airport, and we all know where ever they plan to put it, the blue spotted lung fish will be found in a puddle somewhere, or indeed a aboriginal midden, so that is the end of that. Meanwhile, both CBR and NTL quietly grow to service the big influx of residents moving into both areas, and sooner or later it will dawn on some overpaid public servant that neither have a lung fish/ Midden so perhaps one might be suitable. Then they will examine the cost of a VFT and can it. And nothing will change. So really we need not bother.
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 02:06
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teresa -
As far a I am aware there were NO improvements to Sydney Airport under the previous coalition Federal Government and also NO agreements on any Second Sydney Airport.

Remember the Federal coalition were in power for 11 years and did nothing!

Could you please inform us of the exactly what you believe the previous Coalition Government did that benefited Sydney Airport?

I await with baited breath.

And here is a scenario:
If the Federal coalition are in power after the next election - remember there is also a State coalition in power - do you honestly think there will be any agreements (curfew,movement rate) to Sydney Airport or even progress towards agreeing on a site for a second Sydney Airport?
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 02:45
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I'm with you Teresa,

The Labor Government will not succeed with a viable plan because they are incapable. Albanese is stalling because there is no pressure on him to perform and too much "red tape" with which he can procrastinate. If he had any balls he would reduce the curfew hours at Mascot and build an airport at Badgery's creek.
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 03:00
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You have to be joking!

If he had any balls he would reduce the curfew hours at Mascot and build an airport at Badgery's creek.
This same quote could have been said years ago when the coalition was in power - but (a coterie of previous coalition ministers) didn't have the balls either!

Do you think the coalition will have a viable plan?
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 03:18
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It's clear that the Coalition would have a greater chance at achieving something than the current circus.
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 04:40
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Lucerne,
I live in the North Sydney electorate - Joe Hockey is my local member.
This is what he said:
AIRCRAFT NOISE IN NORTH SYDNEY
16th June 2011

I rise today to talk about a matter that has long been a concern to the residents of my electorate—namely, aircraft noise emanating from Sydney airport. When the Howard government was elected it was determined to ensure there was a fair sharing of aircraft noise over the suburbs of Sydney, a policy that had bipartisan support. Following a long and very difficult consultation process led by the Sydney Airport Community Forum, of which I was the chairman at the time, the government formally adopted the Long Term Operating Plan for Sydney Airport. The plan meant that the percentage of aircraft operations over the northern suburbs of Sydney would drop to an average of 17 per cent. LTOP remains the policy that is meant to guide the government and Airservices Australia in relation to aircraft movements.

The Hon. Joe Hockey :: Shadow Treasurer

AND from Scott Morrison:
Noise sharing plus airport cap and curfew must remain

Friday 2nd March 2012

The existing cap, curfew and noise sharing arrangements at Sydney Airport are non-negotiable, Local Federal Member for Cook Scott Morrison said today, in response to the release of the independent report into Sydney’s future aviation needs.
Scott Morrison MP, Federal Member for Cook.

So would you like to revise your outlook.

What I am saying there has been NO result from either side of politics.

The facts belie your opinion.
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 05:07
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Mr. Mach, may I bring to your attention that the former Labor Govt. of NSW had Four, yes FOUR visibility studies over sixteen years at a large cost to the tax payer, for a VFT to NTL and on to the airport. As yet we have not heard a whistle, not once.
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 05:21
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Former MP Peter Morris comments in Daily Telegraph

It's a Badgerys of honour - build the second airport now, says former federal Transport Minister Peter Morris | thetelegraph.com.au
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 05:26
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teresa,

As yet we have not heard a whistle, not once.
May I bring to your attention that neither political party has done anything for Sydney airport over 16 years!

Can you give an example - where you can nominate something positive - anything that the coalition has done to advance Sydney airport?

No more factoids!
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 05:39
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Well for a start they have not wasted money on FOUR viability studies, and then shelved them. Mate, push your little champs all you like, they are cactus, and perhaps when we get grownups running the country we might see all sorts of achievements, including getting Sydney Airport some help, we can only hope.
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Old 18th Apr 2012, 06:45
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Mate, push your little champs all you like, they are cactus,
They are not my champs - Rather presumptious to suggest that! A facile argument used by both sides of politics.

The problem is that you think that because someone doesn't agree with you then he/she must be a Labor supporter. That argument doesn't pass muster.

Remember I said previously neither political party has done anything - now that shouldn't be too hard to understand!
What I am saying there has been NO result from either side of politics.
What I am asking you is: Can you provide us with something positive that the coalition have done over the last 16 years for Sydney airport? PLEASE

It really can't be that hard - unless they haven't done anything.

Just to keep the discussion apolitical:
I can't provide you provide any positive that the Labor party has done over the last 16 years with regard to Sydney airport.

Maybe you will now get the message that NEITHER political party has done anything.
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