Miss JACKIE KELLY (Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) (12:11 PM) —I rise today to talk about something very dear to my heart, and that is the development that is ongoing in Western Sydney. I do not deny the fact that there is a housing shortage in Sydney. However, I do decry the state government's planning of such housing expansion without the corresponding roll-out of various modes of transport, public schooling, hospital programs, green space and various security measures that are also required in burgeoning suburbs. Something like 13 million Australians live in the suburbs, about one million in the CBDs, about three million on the coast and another three million in our rural areas. So suburban Australia is incredibly important to us and to our futures.

One of the glaring examples of this development is the site of the 50 hectares of defence land just north of the Penrith railway station. This land is smack-dab in the centre of the Penrith CBD. It has been ticked off by council and the state government for residential development. It is proposed to put 422 apartments on the site as well as 391 townhouses and 28 small home sites. This land is clearly right in the middle of the CBD. It is a parcel of land that equates to the development that has gone on at Parramatta or Chatswood. We know what sorts of pressures are being built on it. Obviously, with the return for that type of development, defence having been given the tick and the flick by the state government and the council, why wouldn't they go for that extraordinary amount of money—something like $40 million—that they can get for the land as it is so zoned?

My argument is that this is a great transport node. We certainly need to make provision for car parking, which is already in crisis in Penrith. We need to make room for under-rail future access roads. We need to make room for linking roads from that site through to Mulgoa Road and Northern Road to the east. We certainly need to provide a planned CBD for the enormous amount of housing that is proposed in my area. Something like 4,900 houses are proposed for the lakes environs. Another 500 homes are planned for a site in Castlereagh. At the moment the state government is still proposing over 5,000 homes on the ADI site.

Certainly in other areas of land in Western Sydney that are privately owned the state department of urban planning is heavily pushing this medium-density to high-density living around railway stations. I totally reject that concept for Western Sydney. That is not the suburbia that we aspire to. Certainly around our train stations we would like to see safe transits. Something they can do on the Penrith site is one of those over the rail land developments where the train pulls in and you open up, as you do in Singapore and Japan, into, say, a Woolworths or a department store that is in business 24 hours a day. It certainly provides the type of security, the type of high-tech transport options that females feel comfortable using and will use at all hours, rather than feeling constrained in their movements after dark.

That type of development goes with car parking spaces that are available to shopping centres and makes shopping in the suburbs a pleasure. I know from a few friends in Chatswood that difficulties in parking are a total disincentive to using that shopping area. Given that females do 70 per cent of the household shopping, the time constraints on us and the fact that we often shop with little children in prams et cetera, it becomes a very high priority—certainly in my life—to have a valuable shopping space, a valuable CBD place with easy access and exit and convenient parking. A CBD that continues to structure around those concepts of living in the suburbs makes it a pleasure to go shopping in our towns, rather than it being a rather nightmarish event for a young mother with kids trying to find a parking place kilometres away from where she proposes to shop. I urge a rethink by the state Department of Urban Affairs and Planning in their overall concepts for Western Sydney.