Today in Parliament, Abigail contributed to a debate exposing NSW Labor’s grandstanding on infrastructure and services in Western Sydney, emphasising the harsh realities of poverty in the region and the urgent need for new money to uplift the community.

Abigail said:

One in six children in New South Wales live in poverty. We have 13.3 per cent of our population living in poverty. We have ever-rising costs of living. We have housing stress and a lack of affordability, where people are being kicked out of accommodation like there is no tomorrow. We have domestic and family violence refuges in this State that have people sleeping on porches and in nearby car parks. And yet, despite what is happening on the ground and what people are feeling, particularly in places like Western Sydney, we have this Government crowing about how amazing things are.

If we have learned nothing else from the United States election, it is that we need to meet people where they are. Telling people that everything is great when things are not great is how you distance people from politicians and from democracy. It is really dangerous. This is, at best, a nonsense motion. But, at worst, it is really just telling people how to feel in circumstances where they do not feel it. It is really offensive when we have so many people living in poverty—13.3 per cent of people living in poverty—and in Australia we have 150 billionaires and well over a million millionaires. Here in New South Wales we have a Government that fails to change the status quo and actually start providing for the people for whom it has a responsibility to provide.

I have been out to the Western Sydney Airport. It is a wasteland. There is nothing there except the beginnings of infrastructure to accommodate the next weapons hub. Weapons manufacture is what people in Western Sydney are going to be asked to work in, as though we do not have other industries that we could be facilitating, like green energy and everything else. There is hardly any water connecting people around that airport site. They have been waiting years for sewerage connection. And we are telling them, "Hey, we've got all these great jobs that are coming, maybe, on this wasteland", where there is absolutely no evidence of it, with an airport that is designed to ship out weapons and freight, which is not going to be 24-hour. It is really offensive and, until we start embracing the reality of the situation and changing things up, it is not going to change. Both sides of politics have this thing where they will not raise new money. They need to raise new money from the big corporations and the wealthy people that can afford it and start providing—actually giving money to the people who really need it—through services and infrastructure.

Read the full debate in Hansard here.

20 November 2024