SIMON MARNIE, HOST: The Nancy Bird Walton Airport will be built in Western Sydney. Imagine it to be the size of roughly Coolangatta Airport, that’s a lot of planes coming in and out. So, what are the flight paths for those planes as they make their way in or out of the new Western Sydney Airport? If it’s a question you’ve been asking, I bet you haven’t been thrown out of the house for doing it. Labor MP for Macquarie Susan Templeman has been pursuing this as Sydney continues to grow towards the future. So, we thought we’d find out what are the plans, and this is what you’ve been trying to find out as well, Susan?
SUSAN TEMPLEMAN, MEMBER FOR MACQUARIE: I have. Look, this has been a question I’ve been asking since the airport was announced in October 2015, the draft EIS actually showed us where the planes will go. Then, it said 24 hours a day, seven days a week the planes will fly into the new airport over the Blue Mountains. And 24 hours a day, seven days a week they’ll fly out across Western Sydney and then loop around depending on which direction they’re going. Now, that’s what we were told originally but since then there has been deadly silence from the government and they won’t reveal any of the work they’ve done on these flight paths.
MARNIE: So, 24/7, that means unlike Sydney airport and Bankstown airport, this one will be curfew-free?
TEMPLEMAN: This is setting up an airport that will treat Western Sydney very differently to Eastern Sydney. So, 24 hours a day, seven days a week was the premise on which the airport was viable. And that means that at 3 o’clock in the morning or 2 o’clock in the morning or 4.15 in the morning, somewhere in Western Sydney could be facing – will be facing over the years – flight paths. And it might start out the size of Coolangatta airport but the vision for Western Sydney Airport is that it’s the size of Heathrow within a couple of decades. So, you’re talking about not a little airport with a few planes, you’re talking about a major - and the major - airport for Sydney with the residents under the flight paths being treated very differently to people under the flight paths for Sydney airport.
MARNIE: And when you look at this you say Western Sydney and the Blue Mountains, how broad a spectrum is that geographical area that could face these flights?
TEMPLEMAN: Well, wouldn’t that be good to know? You’d have to think that doing a whole new airport and whole new flight paths - and in fact Airservices has told me this – that they are looking at the whole picture. Now I interpret that as being that there’s going to have to be changes to the flight paths relating to Sydney airport, because you can’t plonk a brand new big airport in Western Sydney and not affect the existing flight paths. So, this, we expect this to be an impact across a whole lot of people, but in the draft EIS they actually show that the bulk of the Western Sydney flights will be places like St Clair, heading out towards Windsor, but the Blue Mountains gets 100 per cent of the incoming flights coming across it.
MARNIE: So many flights over what we know as pristine World Heritage listed areas.
TEMPLEMAN: Well I think that’s the issue. It isn’t just that it is World Heritage, and there are big questions about what the long-term effect of the flights might be over World Heritage, but it’s also a place that isn’t very noisy. You know, people who’ve been escaping to the Blue Mountains for decades don’t do it because it’s a noisy place. Flights aren’t competing with Parramatta Road or constant railway noise, they’re competing with the rustle of gum leaves and the chewing of koalas. So it is not a place where you get a lot of noise, and again when I discussed this with Airservices and I talked about the ambient noise and how quiet it is, Airservices conceded to me that they did ambient noise testing - and this was a couple of years ago – and they said, ‘we’ve ever had such low noise levels’. And I said, ‘well, that’s why we live in the Blue Mountains’. Even now, we obviously get flights now coming out of Sydney airport. They’re anywhere from 13 to 18,000 feet when they go across my place. Even now, we can hear a particularly noisy plane. When we check the flight radar, we can see that those planes are already at 13-and-a-half thousand feet and a long way south across the Jamison Valley yet they still disturb us, we still notice them. That’s the thing about plane noise, it travels a long way and it affects different areas differently.
MARNIE: On ABC Radio Sydney Labor MP for Macquarie Susan Templeman is with us, local Member for those areas within the Blue Mountains and down to the Lower Mountains and Western Sydney. So, you tried to raise this in Parliament yesterday, what happened?
TEMPLEMAN: Well the Member for Lindsay asked a question of the Minister about Western Sydney Airport and the progress, and the one thing that the Member for Lindsay in particular is failing to tell her constituents is that there will be plane noise. So, I take every opportunity I can to challenge the government on why it hasn’t given us more information. Now remember, they told us that the work on the flight paths started in 2017, it’ll be finalised in 2024. Well, here we are three years into the work that they’ve done and not a single piece of information has come through to the community about where those flight paths will be. So I took the question as an opportunity to challenge the Minister, he didn’t respond to my question and the Speaker didn’t take too lightly to it, and after a couple of questions I found myself ejected from Parliament. And I have to say it’s the first time in four-and-a-half years that I’ve been thrown out of Parliament.
MARNIE: Well, we would love to know what those flights paths is, it sounds as though the people of Sydney would like to find out what those flight paths is, indeed even just a no-curfew airport is one that could concern many local residents. Susan Templeman is the local Member for Macquarie, but also listening into the conversation is Trevor Neal, the secretary for Residents Against the Western Sydney Airport, and from the nature of the title of your organisation Trevor, you’re not for the airport anyway. But have you had any idea of what the flights will be?
TREVOR NEAL, RAWSA: Good morning Simon, good morning listeners. Look, I fully endorse what Susan Templeman’s just been speaking about, but it goes beyond that, too. We haven’t been able to get any information from the Department of Infrastructure who are building this airport, nor from the Forum on Western Sydney Airport, which is the supposed public consultation body. It’s just a black hole of information, and it goes beyond the flight paths issue because we’ve already received an acknowledgment by the author of the Western Sydney Airport environmental impact statement that the predicted noise impacts are based on average measurements and not on the actual measurements that are likely to be the maximum that we feel. So, it’s a really deep concern to the community.
MARNIE: I’m going to go back to Susan Templeman because Susan, could it just be that with the airport not due to be open until 2026, that there is no concise answer to these questions just yet?
TEMPLEMAN: Oh no, I think there’s already a lot of work being done, you don’t start laying tarmac – which is basically where they’re at – without having a very good idea that tells you which way the flights are going to go. So they’re got a pretty good idea of that already. They’re just choosing not to tell us because t
