Mr LEO McLEAY(10.13 a.m.) —I support the amendment to the second reading motion on the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill 1996 which was moved by Mr Tanner, and I will say a few things on that matter. I will also speak about some general matters on the administration of civil aviation in this country, particularly as it relates to Sydney.

I join with the member for Chifley (Mr Price) in what he has just said about the probity of the government in introducing this legislation. The absolutely outrageous pressure that the government has put on Mr Justice Fisher, who is the Chairman of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, to resign has been unconscionable, in my view. The government seems to have taken the view that it should just politicise all these things. Mr Justice Fisher is a person of eminent standing and is the chief judge of the labour court in New South Wales. Before that, he was a very successful Queen's Counsel in Sydney. He is a man whose judgment is respected by all those who know him, and he is a person who is not engaged in partisan political activities, which are particularly precluded by his job as a judge.

This legislation is about the government wanting to sack Mr Justice Fisher and put one of their political stooges into this job: a fellow who spent a fortune putting out ads for the government in the last election campaign, and who is the discredited former chairman of the old board that ran civil aviation in this country for some years. He is the man who came forward with the discredited proposition of `affordable safety': Dick Smith. Dick Smith, whom this bill is all about, is a fellow who has no credibility in this. He is a fellow who has spent a lot of time talking about how he is the voice of aviation.  He is the voice of people who want to fly helicopters around the suburbs, and he is the voice of small aircraft operators, but he is certainly not the voice of the travelling public. Indeed, the travelling public in Australia does not at all like the idea of affordable safety.

I am sure members of this parliament, along with the business community of Australia, probably spend the greatest proportion of time travelling in aeroplanes, and the thought that there is a concept such as affordable safety is a pretty terrifying one. But that is what Mr Smith's idea was: that we should let all these things rip. While Mr Smith was able to say that there were very few airline crashes when he was the chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority, I think the difficulties we have had with air safety, with commuter operators, is a direct outgrowth of Mr Smith's discredited policy of affordable safety.

Mr Smith's argument was that we ought to let it rip; let small operators get out there and run their businesses. That ethos that filtered down in the civil aviation area and allowed for some of these more tragic occurrences in the commuter area is a direct result of the attitude that Dick Smith had when he was the supremo of the civil aviation area.

Members on the other side might say that he was an appointment of ours. Yes, he was an appointment of ours. We put him on the board and then we made him chairman. If you speak to Senator Collins, who was the minister at the time, he will tell you that it took him about 15 minutes after that to work out that Dick Smith was probably the worst chairman that we ever had. He made a number of entreaties to Mr Smith that he ought to resign and it is quite well known that the government of the day was not all that happy with Mr Smith as the chairman of that body. We did not bring in a bill to undermine him. We let him run his course and we never reappointed him. We did not bring in a bill to rearrange the board, to put someone in to look over Mr Smith's shoulder. If the government wants to do that to Justice Fisher, that is its prerogative, but it should not come in here with this sleazy tactic of expanding the board.

The government talks about jobs for the boys, for goodness sake! Dick Smith is a corporate member of the Liberal Party. This is a fellow who spent a lot of his own money in the last elections putting ads in the paper for the Liberal Party. You do not get much more commitment to a party than that, where someone actually shells out their own money for big ads in the paper. But the government says, `Dick Smith? Don't think we've heard of him. We've seen a bit of him in the paper; knows a lot about aviation.' Dick Smith knows far more about the Liberal Party than he knows about aviation. The government wants to go and corrupt this body by expanding it to put its political mates on it.

I think the second reading amendment being put forward by Mr Tanner is the one that ought to be followed if the government is serious in what it says it wants to do about the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Mr Tanner's amendment states:

Whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House is of the opinion that:

(1)   it is appropriate that the Board of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority should include members in areas such as the law, regulation and general systems safety, as well as members with specific expertise in aviation . . .

Indeed, that is the way the board is constructed now. There are people who represent the travelling public, who probably ought to have a bit of a say in what happens with the Civil Aviation Safety Authority. There is a very eminent judge in Justice Fisher. There is a person who has very significant experience in large jets as well as the small weekenders that Mr Smith has some expertise in. We think the board at present is a fairly well constituted board.

The important thing which is raised in the second paragraph of Mr Tanner's amendment is:

no person should be appointed to the Board who has engaged recently in political lobbying or public advocacy on aviation safety issues on behalf of any company or interest group involved in the aviation industry.

I suppose Mr Tanner is being quite generous there in not suggesting Mr Smith's other interest, which is the Liberal Party of Australia. I think the parliament should think very carefully about whether we want to have the discredited Dick Smith back on the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and whether we want the discredited Dick Smith running his old discredited line again of affordable safety.

There is no such thing as affordable safety. In Australia we have been very lucky in this area. There have been few significant aviation disasters. Some people would tell you that that is a function of the weather here and the lack of congestion in the airways as much as it is the work of the civil aviation bureaucracy. I think that what we want in that bureaucracy are people who are going to put safety to the forefront.

I also wish to say a few things about the way civil aviation has degenerated in the Sydney basin since the government came to office. We saw the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) in the election campaign, for blatant political purposes, decide that they were going to let not 1,000 flowers bloom but 1,000 planes fly anywhere and everywhere that they wanted to over the Sydney basin. Then, the week after the election, we had revealed this deal that seems to have been done with some obscure group that wishes to promote an airport at Holsworthy. In all the competitions or considerations that have been held over the previous years as to where a second airport for Sydney should be built, Holsworthy had always come in second or third last. Now we have the government promoting it to being second best.

It raises interesting questions about what this airport might be like because Holsworthy is an area that has great amounts of unexploded ordnance on the site and it is also an area that has very deep ravines and river valleys. One of the reasons that the Minister for Transport and Regional Development (Mr Sharp) gave as to why he thought Holsworthy should be given consideration and why he thought Badgerys Creek was not terrific was that there were rolling hills at Badgerys Creek.

We have gone from a situation where an airport site is given a downgrading in the minister's eyes because it has a rolling hills topography to one where a site that is full of ravines becomes popular all of a sudden. It just boggles the mind. I do not know; maybe the government has some new technology that will enable it to develop a machine that will explode all the unexploded bombs on the firing range there and which will blow all the dirt into the ravines so that with one big bang it will have flattened out the Holsworthy area. Unless the government has something like that in mind, then just the engineering task for turning Holsworthy into an airport is daunting, to say the least.

There is also the difficulty that it will cause to the residents who live around that Holsworthy area. They all went to the election reading about the big aircraft noise debate in Sydney and thinking, `Well, with all these maps that have been drawn, we are pretty safe. No-one is talking about putting an airport in my backyard.' They then got rid of Bob Tickner because they were feeling pretty safe out there in those nice little new suburbs like Wattle Grove. Then the week after the election they found there was a confidence trick—that the Prime Minister was not thinking about putting an airport out at Badgerys Creek; but there was this proposal for Holsworthy.

It turns out that these people had been to see the Prime Minister before the election. This is the Prime Minister who was going to bring honesty and probity back into the political system. But did we get one whisper of this during the election campaign? Not on your nelly, because they did not want the truth to get in the way of beating Bob Tickner in Hughes. We never heard the new member for Hughes, Danna Vale, saying anything about this during the election campaign—not a word. The people who bought houses out in Wattle Grove have just lost tens of thousands of dollars from the value of their houses. No-one in their right mind would buy a house there now. The government has tainted that area for quite some time because of its proposals to allow those real estate sharks who are behind the Lawrence Hargraves project to come out there, hoping to build an airport at Holsworthy.

Also during the election campaign, we heard a few other mistruths told around the place. I remember reading in the Sydney Morning Herald that the Prime Minister was never going to let planes fly over the Lowe electorate. The people of Lowe had a choice: if they wanted no more aircraft noise, the simple choice was to vote for Mr Zammit; if they wanted aircraft noise, they should keep voting for Mrs Easson. If they wanted their property values to go up, they should vote for Zammit; if they wanted aircraft noise, they should vote for Easson. Unfortunately, the people of Lowe did vote for Mr Zammit. A great number of those people voted for Mr Zammit because they believed the Prime Minister when he said that there would not be planes flying over the electorate of Lowe under a Liberal Party government. They voted for him for that.

But what has happened since then? We have let the thousand aircraft fly. On Saturday last, the Federal Airports Corporation's inquiry unit received nearly 400 complaints about aircraft noise in Sydney. Most of those were complaints about northerly and westerly departures. On Sunday of last week, before 5 p.m. it had received nearly 300 complaints. There are new noise hot spots occurring around Sydney now. Suburbs such as Dulwich Hill, Summer Hill, Ashfield, Concord, Petersham, Lewisham, Earlwood, Arncliffe, Haberfield and Bexley never used to experience aircraft noise, but they are now getting it on a daily basis. Currently around Sydney there are no designated flight paths. Planes taking off to the north have only to fly four nautical miles before they can turn and fly wherever they like.

I have to tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not think many of those pilots or the people in the control tower heard what the Prime Minister said. I really do not think they did, because you have got a lot of planes flying over Haberfield, Croydon, Burwood and Strathfield in the electorate of Lowe. There are a lot of people complaining. I know, because my electorate is next-door, and I get the complaints from them when they have rung Mr Zammit and he has given them a mealy-mouthed explanation about not knowing that this was going to happen because John Howard said it would not happen. They ring my office and complain about these things.

So much for the promise made to the people of Lowe that there would be no more planes flying over Lowe, and so much for the lack of information given to the people of Wattle Grove when they concealed this idea to build an airport next to where they live. The government does not have very clean hands on this aircraft business in the Sydney basin. What we really need to see is the government, rather than just letting these planes fly everywhere, starting to give some cogent view of what we should be doing with Sydney airport and with the air transportation needs of the city of Sydney.

The great worry that I have now is that we are going to see the EIS for Badgerys Creek fall over. There is no doubt in any way, shape or form that an EIS for Holsworthy will fall over. And, in six or eight months time, we will find ourselves with no alternative site for an airport in Sydney—no site. The government will think that is pretty good, because they will tip back into the general revenue fund the money that we allocated in the budget for work at Badgerys Creek and say, `We've taken $600 million off the bottom line—and it wasn't really our fault because the EIS fell down.' But, after 10 or 15 years of planning, we will not have a site.

We will be back to where Malcolm Fraser was when he got the report of the study on the major airport needs of Sydney. We will be back to Sydney airport, no other site, and absolute chaos for the people who live south of Sydney Harbour. The reality is that if you do not have an alternate site constructed shortly, Sydney airport will meet its capacity and you will have to do away with the curfew, you will have to do away with the cap of 80 movements an hour that the Labor government put on this airport, and you will also ensure that commuters who come from country New South Wales will not have any service into Sydney airport at all. They will have none because the government will sell these slots at the airport for landings and the pressure for the use of the airport from the major operators will keep country commuters out. What we will have in a few years time will be an impossible situation at Sydney airport.

So the government really needs to start to think about this seriously and not get themselves caught up in the politics of: `We think the Labor Party hurt us, so we are now going to hurt Labor voters.' They probably ought, in the first instance, to stop hurting the people who voted for them—the people in Lowe and out in Hughes. And they certainly should not put a discredited person such as Dick Smith on this board. They should leave the people on the board alone so that they can do the job they were appointed to do.