E&OE TRANSCRIPT
2GB Straight Shooters RADIO INTERVIEW
TUESDAY, 27 MAY 2025
SUBJECT: ROSE HILL RACECOURSE SALE, WESTERN SYDNEY INFRASTRUCTURE, AUSTRALIAN ELECTORAL COMMISSION, FLOOD RECOVERY PAYMENTS
Clinton Maynard: Our Straight Shooters on a Tuesday Afternoon are Susan Templeman, the member for Hawkesbury, and the outgoing Liberal Senator for NSW, Hollie Hughes. Hello Hollie, Hello, Susan. As members in Sydney, I both want to get your perspectives on this. I’ll start with you, Susan. As a Western Sydney MP, the plan is not going to happen. The Rose Hill Racecourse will not be sold off. Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing?
Susan Templeman: I’m with the Premier. I think it’s a missed opportunity, a lost opportunity for Sydney and for housing and for young people who may be, you know, hanging out for governments to really find places to build. But it is the decision by the ATC. They’re the landowners and we have to respect that decision.
Clinton Maynard: Hollie, what’s your view?
Senator Hollie Hughes: Well, I’m a member of the ATC. So, I’ve been a member for a while and go to the races both and Randwick and Rose Hill. And there was certainly a very strong sentiment within the trainers, with a lot of the membership that it wasn’t ultimately a deal that they felt was going to be beneficial to the club. I mean, I know that sort of, it’s been put in terms of $5 million, but it was over a very extended period of time. I think it was 15. So, you know, there was feelings within the membership and the communication around it. You know, I’ve had a flurry of communication in the last couple of weeks for this vote because the vote was previously postponed, trying to get more support for it. There was certainly a lot of sweetness being offered to members, but you know, when you’ve got trainers like Gai Waterhouse and some of the others coming out so strongly against it, you’ve got to respect what the membership and the racing fraternity have voted for. I think Frank Carbone’s right when he says that there are other opportunities that perhaps the state government should look at. And there’s so much red tape involved with housing development, you know, it might be more of an opportunity for the Premier to have a good look at those that are currently trying to be developed that are bogged down in red tape.
Clinton Maynard: We’ve got so many text messages about this. Tim says, “All the no votes, I bet they haven’t been to Rose Hill for the past twenty years.”. Anne says, “A golden opportunity lost to jam 26,000 homes into an already full area that doesn’t have enough infrastructure.”. And look, that is an issue Susan, that there isn’t enough infrastructure in Sydney’s western suburbs.
Susan Templeman: Well, this has always been, sort of something Sydney’s had for decades is ‘What comes first, the infrastructure?’. But it was really clear that there was going to be new public transport there. We have a big issue in Sydney around housing. We have lots of people who don’t want it in their backyard, who don’t want it near them, and that’s what the state government has to navigate. Along with councils, they have to really kick this along because we’re investing in housing at a federal level. We’re incentivising the states to do it, and this really is the first time since we were last in government, they’ve had a federal government actively involved saying, ok guys, we want to help you make this happen. But ultimately, it is the state that has to do the hard yards.
Clinton Maynard: Ian’s asking the question on the text line, why doesn’t the government build a metro station at Rose Hill anyway, future proof it for development, in the meantime be utilised by racegoers, workers and residents of the area? I think the problem is, Ian, the government would need a minimum billion dollars to build that extra station. It doesn’t want to spend the money. Now, fortunately, this vote count has concluded quite quickly. So, the meeting was at two o’clock. We had a result just after 3:30. Fortunately, the AEC has had nothing to do with the count, which is a good thing because they like to take their time, the AEC. We’ve had news in the past 24 hours there will be a partial recount in Goldstein. The request was made by the Teal Independent Zoe Daniels. There’ll be a full recount as well in Bradfield because there was fewer than 100 votes that were the difference between the Teal candidate and the Liberal candidate. Does the AEC, do you think, Susan, maybe need to review how it conducts the count? Because it seems to take a long time.
Susan Templeman: Well, I’ve been on the receiving end of a long vote, a long count. It took 16 days for me in 2019 to count the votes. But then, of course they do a recount in terms of checking the distribution of preferences because they want the final data to be accurate, so we should be really grateful that we’ve got a thorough process and I was in the Erskine Park counting centre with the AEC on Friday, because my seat was declared and I was declared the successful candidate. And, you know, it’s quite extraordinary to see ordinary Aussies, just your average person there who puts their hand up to go and be part of this extraordinary democratic process. So, I think we should be really proud of it. Yes, there’ll be a lot of humans involved, and time involved, but that gives us a result that we can trust, and that’s really key.
Clinton Maynard: Well, Hollie, we do have a strong democratic system, but could we maybe employ a few more people with the AEC to get these vote counts completed faster?
Hollie Hughes: Well, I mean, it does take a long period of time. And that is with the compulsory preferential voting that everyone's got to fill out every square on the ballot paper. So, you know, getting the result right. I mean, in Bradfield, the difference is eight votes. I mean, it’s extraordinary when you think of seats with 130,000 voters in them and it comes down to eight votes. And it is important that each one is checked. And, you know, maybe more people might be the answer but then they’re all double checked as well and they’re counted you know as we know on election night, you know they’re counted at each booth then they all go in centrally and it’s making sure that process is as smooth as possible.
Clinton Maynard: The Prime Minister’s detailed flood recovery payments for people affected by the natural disaster on the mid-north coast of the Hunter Valley today, so one-off payment of $1,000 per eligible adult, $400 per child. There’ll be, for those who are without employment, because of the flood, 13 weeks of payments. There’ll be some interest free or low interest loans. Do you think that, both ladies, and I'll start with you, Susan, something needs to be done more in the long term about how we operate insurance in these areas?
Susan Templeman: I heard you talking to the Insurance Council, Andrew Hall, and I’ve spent years working on this issue because I got one of these payments back in 2013 when my house burnt down, and it is a simple emergency payment that just buys you the essentials for that first, you know, you’ve got nothing. You need undies. You need toothpaste. You need more than one pair of shoes. The clothes that you’re wearing smell of smoke. Now, in floods, they’re going to need so much just to get through the next few days, let alone the next few weeks or months. The real issue is the mix between what government and taxpayers fund in disasters and how we make insurance affordable so that then the insurance can then kick in.
Clinton Maynard: Exactly.
Susan Templeman: As it did for me, after the fires. Eventually, you know a week later, my insurance got cleared and I had access to the funds that I needed, certainly for the immediate term. The whole under-insurance issue of rebuilding is just a totally other complex issue. This is unfinished business for me. We started the work in our first term of government. I was part of an inquiry into the 2022 floods that looked at the behaviour of the insurers. I hope they’ve learnt a lot from our inquiry and from the experience they had where they did let people down in 2021 and 2022 in how they deal with people who are insured. But the other issue is those thousands of people who are not insured, and that is a problem not just for them, but for all of us.
Clinton Maynard: It is.
Susan Templeman: Because they are our fellow Australians.
Clinton Maynard: And in the end, we often end up bailing those people out. So there needs to be a better long-term solution. We are out of time, thank you Hollie, Thank you Susan.
Hollie Hughes: Thank you.
Susan Templeman: Thank you.
Clinton Maynard: Hollie Hughes and Susan Templeman, our straight shooters.
ENDS
