26th September, 2024.
I make a short contribution to the debate on the Regional Communities (Consultation Standards) Bill 2024. I appreciate the member for Barwon seeking to set a standard on how the Government will engage with regional communities, as those communities experience limitations with access, transport and engagement. I listened to the debate, but I am not really interested in what people have or have not done previously; I am interested in making improvements going forward. Stakeholder engagement in regional communities is often a piecemeal approach. Often there are no newspapers to advertise to; the internet and telephone connection is limited; and there are wide distances for these communities to travel for services—if in fact they have the ability to travel on public transport.
It may surprise members in this place that there are communities that are remote but are just a few hours drive from the city. How is it possible that communities have no access to town water, have dirt roads and are not serviced for most things provided by council and State? This is the case for Wollondilly, yet it is classified in some regards as metropolitan and part of Greater Sydney. That is my concern with the bill. There is a long history to this provision. It began before I even moved to Wollondilly and before the Wollondilly community even had a State seat of our own returned to us. Until recent times we were a community split between three or four separate State districts.
On 7 March 1989 the then planning Minister, the Hon. David Hay, who was elected to represent his metropolitan community of Manly, signed the declaration of a schedule of the Sydney region to include the outer areas of the shires of Baulkham Hills, Hawkesbury, Hornsby, Sutherland, Warringah, Wollondilly and Wyong. That took away our regional status. The effect of the declaration changed how the Government allows provisions to come to our region. Sometimes we are eligible for funding, being in a metro area; other times we are not eligible, due to the regional focus of grants. Those paper maps and lines do not change the reality of the situation. In reality, Wollondilly is a peri-urban area, a community forced to travel for work and school. We live in paradise but are not provided the same opportunities as other regional communities.
It takes four hours for me to visit the residents of Yerranderie, a remote mining town that is cut off because the previous access through the Burragorang Valley is inaccessible through Warragamba Dam. The rural roads that service the town are accessible only with a four-wheel drive and are often closed. The Government has told residents that they are unable to use the airstrip that was gifted to the Government by the previous owner, Val Lhuede. Only recently some of my towns and villages got access to town water and sewer, yet there is an expectation for the Wollondilly community to accept 30,000 homes. Adding to the complexity, half of my electorate is counted as being metro, while the other half is regional.
The answers to Wollondilly's issues are not in this bill, but I support any improvement to engaging with regional communities, including the provisions that the bill supports through best practice. The Government needs to set boundaries sensibly and not rely on old decisions; otherwise, the remote and regional communities that are geographically closest to Sydney will continue to miss out, as always, on the funding intended for them.