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Albanese backs SBS move to western Sydney, pledges infrastructure panel
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has signalled his intent to move multicultural broadcaster SBS to western Sydney and will tell an audience of business and community leaders on Friday that the move “makes sense” as a cultural investment in the city’s west.
He is also set to address a funding stoush with the NSW government over rapid bus links to the forthcoming Western Sydney Airport, after Premier Dominic Perrottet earlier this week demanded the Commonwealth stump up 80 per cent of the cash.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will address the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue on Friday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Albanese will on Friday speak at a luncheon hosted by the Western Sydney Leadership Dialogue, whose chair Christopher Brown was also emphatic this week that all levels of government must abide by commitments made under the Western Sydney City Deal signed by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2018.
The deal called on the federal government to pay for 80 per cent of the $1.6 billion project, which will provide new rapid busways from Penrith, Liverpool and Campbelltown to the airport, due to open in 2026.
“There’s no point building a new airport without making it easy for people to get there,” Albanese will say, according to excerpts of the speech provided to the Herald by his office.
While the excerpts provided did not address the bus links, Albanese will cite the Western Sydney City Deal and the federal government’s $5.25 billion contribution to the airport metro rail line.
“Investing in infrastructure has always been core business for reforming Labor governments,” he will say, noting western Sydney is growing at an extraordinary rate and is already home to more people than Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart and Darwin combined.
Albanese will also affirm his commitment to the Castlereagh Connection, a new east-west road running from the M7 across the Nepean River north of Penrith, which has long been sought by Brown’s lobby group and Penrith City Council as a necessary flood evacuation route.
“This is a long-term project that recognises a long-term reality: we need to take flood and other extreme weather events into account when planning infrastructure investments,” he will say.
Albanese will also promise to create an independent Western Sydney Expert Panel to review and report on the area’s infrastructure needs, “to take the politics out of planning”.
In another win for the city’s west, Albanese will all but commit to moving SBS, the multicultural broadcaster, to western Sydney. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland, who will also appear at Friday’s event, is commissioning a feasibility study on the move, but Albanese said he believed it was sensible.
“We’ll wait and see what the study says, but it certainly makes sense for such a fast-growing, multicultural community to be the home of the broadcaster that celebrates and serves Australia’s diversity,” Albanese will say.
“It would be an important cultural investment in western Sydney and a creator of construction jobs.”
The prime minister will point out that in western Sydney, “Singh has replaced Smith as the most common surname in areas like Blacktown and Campbelltown”, and “shops selling bubble tea and sugar-cane juice have joined the delis run by Greek and Italian migrants”.
The foreshadowed SBS move has already intensified a bidding war between councils. Liverpool, Parramatta, Blacktown and Canterbury-Bankstown are all jostling to be the broadcaster’s new home.
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