I welcome the opportunity to discuss the city deals in this place and the deals that were struck with Western Sydney as some sort of payoff for the impacts of the Western Sydney airport, an airport for which we still don't have flight paths because the government's too scared to get that conversation out of the bag.

There is no question that there have been some funds for some really great little projects in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury. These are the things they have wanted to do, but they have been starved of funds for so long as the Liberal governments froze their increases year on year and every government has asked councils to do more with less.

But it's the oversight of the spending of billions of dollars that we should be worried about. The lack of oversight shouldn't surprise anyone, given the Liberals' aversity to scrutiny. Let's look at the abject failure of the government to buy land that delivers value to money to the Australian taxpayer called the Leppington Triangle. $30 million for land worth $3 million—of all the valuations done, they chose the most expensive, an admission by the secretary of the infrastructure department that the unit making these decisions, the Western Sydney Unit, needed to be cleaned out. That does not give anyone confidence in the billions of dollars that are being spent.
Sadly, the billions are not being spent in my electorate of Macquarie. The Blue Mountains got one set of lights on the Great Western Highway as part of the city deal. This was a small project already planned, but it is not going to help the traffic that we may see as a result of the Western Sydney airport. The other real problem is that the extra $4 billion increase in the cost of building the Sydney Metro Western Sydney airport line does absolutely nothing to make it easier for Hawkesbury residents or businesses to access the airport. There isn't going to be a connection to the Richmond train line any time in the foreseeable future. The trip to the Western Sydney airport will involve catching a train to Blacktown, changing trains to St Marys and then changing to the new line. The public transport needs of the Hawkesbury have been completely ignored in the infrastructure planning for this airport, and so too have been the road needs. There is nothing to improve the roads leaving the Hawkesbury and heading south to the airport. It's not until you reach the Penrith area—in the electorate of Lindsay—that any kind of upgrade occurs. As always with the Liberals, the Hawkesbury's being taken for granted. The people in the Hawkesbury are just expected to put up with stuff from Liberal governments. In fact they're expected to put up with what they don't get, rather than what they do get. The same criticisms have been made by the member for Macarthur about the lack of rail link to his community only a few kilometres south of the airport.

More than anything, though, this is a missed opportunity to improve the safety of the Hawkesbury, which is among the most flood-prone valleys in the country. Yet there's nothing done to improve residents' safety by upgrading roads. Right now we have a state government that tells us you have to evacuate from the Hawkesbury via road if there is a major flood. There is a video showing you where to go, but it also stresses that every one of these roads floods, so you need to leave early. That is what happens when the roads are on the floodplain. We all know the Jim Anderson bridge locally, but did you know it was built by a Labor state government to make it easier to leave when the waters are rising? It is pretty much the only piece of infrastructure that has been put in. There are no roads that the last seven years of federal Liberals or the last nine years of state Liberals have delivered to this community to make it safer—certainly not the new Windsor bridge, which has already been shown to offer minimal support for flood resilience, and certainly not the Richmond duplication project, where the RMS has stated categorically that planning for flood is not part of its remit because it doesn't have enough of a budget to include flood resilience. That is a federally funded project. Let's remember that these city deals are meant to 'secure the future prosperity and liveability of our cities'. Well, hardly! The state government is looking to allow a further 134,000 residents to join the 30,000 existing residents on the floodplain over the next 30 years, yet there are no steps in the so-called Western Parkland City to improve evacuation of those residents. In 2017, an evacuation infrastructure analysis that was completed for the New South Wales government by Infrastructure New South Wales found that effective evacuation is the only measure that guarantees a reduced risk to life in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley. A $950 million program of upgrading roads to allow evacuation at higher flood levels was considered before being dismissed due to cost in the government's 2017 strategy. A similar finding in 2012 found there is significant risk without evacuation upgrades and recommended that routes around Windsor, Bligh Park, Richmond and Penrith be upgraded. These are the sorts of practical things the city deals should have invested in.