CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr HAWKE (Mitchell) (09:47): I rise to update the House on the ongoing campaign to get the extension of the metro line from St Marys to Tallawong ending in my electorate of Mitchell at Rouse Hill. I also want to acknowledge the member for Chifley, who has had a serious accident. I have been in touch with him, and he has of course been working on this with the community with a big rally out in Western Sydney even though he's had that accident.

We wish him all the very best in his recovery. We share a lot of political views in relation to this. We also have opposing views.

It was the coalition Morrison government that said that we're going to finally build and have the second Sydney airport, the Nancy-Bird Walton Airport, which has laid the platform for the infrastructure that we've needed across Western Sydney and through the north-west. Unfortunately, the member for Chifley opposed the airport. He and Blacktown City Council ran campaigns against it.

The Hills Shire Council and I ran campaigns for it, understanding it brings tens of thousands of jobs. It'll be a genuinely 24/7 airport in one of the most important cities in Australia—the gateway to the world, the biggest population, the biggest economy. With that came the Sydney metro—the world-class, world-leading infrastructure of the Baird government and the Berejiklian government.

We learnt yesterday from Matt O'Sullivan at the Sydney Morning Herald that patronage is a third higher than the forecasts expected. Sydney has embraced the metro and everything it means as world-class transportation infrastructure—abandoning their cars, getting onto that metro. Using it is now a definitively Sydney experience.

When we talk about the extension from St Marys to Tallawong, this is a critical next step for this metro to be effective—to become like a London, to become like a New York. I say to the Minns government—the Premier, when he came into office, said that Sydney should not get used to this world-class kind of infrastructure. Why not?

Premier Baird laid the foundation for the metro to be built by privatising the poles and wires. It was embraced by the electorate at an election—proper policy put to an electorate, voted in by an electorate, delivered by a coalition government. I think we have the spine of the best, world-class metro anywhere, in any city in the world.

But each government needs to add its next steps. If the Minns government, over the time it's in office, doesn't add the next steps of the metro line, we will never get that genuine criss-cross that we need across our great city of Sydney to deliver the genuine public transport vision that we all want to see inside our city. I do thank my friend the member for Chifley for embracing this campaign, because he's right.

Now, of course, we need the airport to enable it. We disagree on that. But he now believes that the metro line is critical.

I share that view with him. We campaigned together. Blacktown is working together with The Hills.

Of course we want the metro line. The cost of not acting on this now is so large, because the business case for $40 million will tell you—we don't need to see it—that, if we don't do this now, while the airport lines are being constructed, and finish the job, it will cost 10 times as much to go back and do it in the future. Let's get on with it.

Let's add the next line of the metro to Tallawong.