For more than half a century, I have lived in Sydney.
I love this city: our harbour, our beaches, and our bush.
On a good day at Manly beach, just 15 minutes from where I live, you can surf among the dolphins.
On the other side of my street, is Garigal National Park.
Forestville is just 15 minutes from the CBD, at the right times, yet you can walk for two minutes, and not be able to see a single house; possums promenade along the power lines, lorikeets swarm on the balcony, and bush turkeys invade the back garden.
Much of Sydney is a city in a national park.
It’s the bush and the water that gives Sydney its unique character and should never be put at risk.
It is truly one of the very best places on earth to live – until you have to move around – when you’re often stuck in some of the world’s longest car parks.
I grew up in Chatswood, within a good walk of the railway station. Dad could walk to work, children walked to the station and mum had a short drive to the shops.
Beyond the inner city, for Sydneysiders living further than a decent walk from a railway station, you depend on a car – or an irregular bus service – and either way you need a decent road.
As a student, I struggled through clogged roads from the north shore to the inner west.
As a commuter, I braved traffic jams to reach a station without a decent car park.
And as a prime minister, like everyone else with somewhere to go at the wrong time of day, I inch through gridlock to get to the airport.
The first home I owned was in a one lane street that turned into a race way every two minutes when the lights changed at the intersection of the Princes Highway and Canal Rd.
That’s Sydney’s problem: it’s a city of over four million people – tipped to reach six million within two decades – with roads designed for two million; and the decent roads we do have still don’t actually join up.
Bad roads add hours to your day and stress to your life; bad roads mean you’re late for work and spend less time at home; bad roads mean more smog from vehicles in gridlock and more suburban streets turned into traffic canyons.
That’s why, as long as I’ve been able to travel, I’ve dreamt of a Sydney that all of us could move around much more freely.
It’s the job of state governments to plan and deliver infrastructure; it’s the job of local governments to provide municipal services and create attractive communities; and it’s the job of the national government to end the talk and to get things built.
As a citizen, I want a friendly neighbourhood that’s hard to change beyond recognition; I want a state government with a plan for my city and the determination to make it happen.
As prime minister, though, my job is to build prosperity for all of us; in part, through securing the first world infrastructure that green activism, policy procrastination, and misguided priorities have so far stopped.
As an infrastructure prime minister, my job is to work with the premiers to ensure that our national roads, freight, power, communications and water systems are no longer holding us back.
And as the infrastructure prime minister, it’s a particular honour to present this first Bradfield Oration – the first of many, I hope.
No other engineer has made such a mark on our city, on our state and on our country as John Bradfield.
As a senior public works department engineer for almost 40 years, Bradfield transformed Sydney – and ultimately Australia.
He helped to design the Burrinjuck and Cataract Dams in New South Wales, the Story Bridge in Brisbane, Sydney’s City Circle railway line, and – his signature achievement – the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
A bridge over Sydney Harbour had first been proposed to Governor Macquarie by Francis Greenway in 1815.
A century later, nothing had happened.
For over a century, politicians had talked and residents had dreamed of a bridge between Dawes Point and Milson’s Point – after all, it was only five hundred metres.
It was John Bradfield who finally supervised the bridge’s construction – from conception to completion.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is one of the marvels of our city and one of the greatest feats of its time.
Its principal designer was a profound talent with dogged persistence, compelling eloquence and an inspiring vision.
Bradfield was the first doctor of engineering from Sydney University and won the university gold medal.
His doctoral thesis title reflects his life’s work: “The city and suburban electric railways and the Sydney Harbour Bridge”.
In a quirk of history, his examiner was another engineer of genius: Sir John Monash.
As a former Premier Jack Lang observed of Bradfield, when Sydney’s population was scarcely one million, he was “the first man to plan for…a city of two million people”.
As we celebrate Bradfield’s vision, we should also gratefully acknowledge the civic leaders who invested in it and helped to make it happen.
Long before he had completed the Bridge, Bradfield confided to his diary: “When I visualise the future, I feel that I was born 30 years too soon because the achievement of today will be but a stepping stone for greater feats necessary for the development of this great city”.
This is our challenge: not to play catch up but, like Bradfield, to plan for the future.
In 1932, when the bridge opened, there were under 200,000 registered vehicles in the whole of NSW.
In its first year, the Bridge carried only 11,000 vehicles a day.
Bradfield did not envisage infrastructure for his time alone but for our time too.
His thinking was not for today or even for the next decade; it was for the next half century and beyond.
Our challenge is to be as forward thinking in our time as Bradfield was in his.
In his day, there were two Sydneys divided by water.
Today, there are two Sydneys divided by travelling times: one Sydney for people who can get to work within an hour; and a tougher, more stressful Sydney for people who spend over two hours a day travelling.
People in the west, the south, the central coast and even the northern beaches can feel as cut off from their destinations as those who lived on the lower north shore in the pre-bridge years before 1932.
Our challenge is to ensure that getting from one side of the metropolitan area to another is as easy as Bradfield made getting to the other side of the harbour.
The success of Sydney is fundamental to our nation’s economy.
Sydney contributes over a fifth of Australia’s GDP.
As our largest city – with leading financial services, tourism, education, health and manufacturing – it contributes more to our national wealth than any other place in Australia.
It could contribute even more if road congestion didn’t cost an estimated $6 billion a year.
Ask yourself how much has congestion cost you and your family in lost time, extra fuel, or wear-and-tear?
I don’t doubt our transport economists – but suspect that $6 billion is a very conservative figure indeed.
Congestion, of course, is not unique to Sydney.
Traffic jams plague all our big cities.
People leave earlier and earlier for work – and leave later and later for home – all in increasingly vain attempts to miss peak periods.
It’s why I am determined to be the Infrastructure Prime Minister building the roads of the 21st century – because movement is what distinguishes us from previous generations and more ease of movement, like more disposable income, is one of the litmus tests of prosperity.
In the Budget, the government committed a record $50 billion to new transport infrastructure.
Thanks to the asset recycling fund – which will add 15 per cent to any proceeds of privatisation that are reinvested in economic infrastructure, including, should the states choose, urban rail – this budget is forecast to generate a record $125 billion of public and private infrastructure investment over the next decade.
My aim is cranes in our skies and bulldozers on the ground.
Commonwealth funding is driving the East West Link in Melbourne – where stage one alone will generate nearly 4000 jobs and save the occupants of 100,000 vehicles 15 minutes a day.
There’s the full North-South Road Corridor in Adelaide within a decade.
There’s the Perth gateway project, the Swan Valley Bypass, and the Perth freight link project.
There’s the Gateway Motorway upgrade in Brisbane, the Toowoomba Second Range Crossing and major works to fix the Bruce Highway throughout coastal Queensland.
There’s the upgrade of the Midland Highway in Tasmania and key roads in the Northern Territory.
But the biggest road projects are rightly in New South Wales – because in the decade after the Olympics the state government was out to lunch, to put it at its kindest.
The work in Sydney starts with Australia’s biggest road project.
WestConnex will eliminate up to 52 sets of traffic lights from 100,000 journeys a day – giving back to each vehicle’s occupants 40 minutes that would have otherwise been wasted in traffic jams.
Then there’s the upgrade of the Pacific Highway and the completion of NorthConnex – so that by decade’s end there will be only two stretches of traffic lights between Melbourne and Brisbane.
And after 50 years of talk, a decision has now been made about Sydney’s second airport site – or, as I prefer, western Sydney’s first airport.
This airport will happen – but so will the road and rail links to make it work and they’ll be built before the first planes land.
You can tell that this government is serious because we haven’t just announced the airport, we’re already building the roads – such as Bringelly Rd where site works start soon.
It’s “roads first, airport second”.
The largely-Commonwealth funded western Sydney infrastructure plan will produce more than 50 kilometres of high quality roads with motorway standard interchanges.
The new airport is essential because the numbers flying into Sydney will almost double over the next twenty years – and they can’t all land at Mascot which is struggling to cope and has been for years.
Without another airport for Sydney, the national economy is tipped to be $34 billion smaller in 2060 and NSW will miss out on almost 60,000 jobs.
If western Sydney is to be a city in its own right rather than a dormitory for somewhere else, it needs its own airport.
The western Sydney airport should become Australia’s principal air freight hub and the centre of a massive business park.
The new airport is going to plan.
Consultations with the Sydney Airport Group are underway.
A commercial model and the airport concept designs are being worked up.
And construction should begin in 2016.
I thank all the people who have put NIMBY politics aside to focus on what our city and our country really needs.
I thank the local councils and chambers of commerce.
I thank the most-impacted members of parliament, especially Fiona Scott, Russell Matheson and Louise Markus.
I thank the shadow minister for transport, Anthony Albanese for the most important economic bi-partisanship by far of this term of parliament.
I thank the Baird government in NSW which isn’t just talking about western Sydney but delivering for it – with the north-west rail link already under construction and the M2 upgrade completed.
And, of course, I thank my ministerial colleagues Warren Truss and Jamie Briggs who have focused on getting things done, not finding excuses.
Not much that governments do matters half a century on.
The decision to build the western Sydney airport will permanently change our city and our country.
It shows that we are no less capable than our parents and grandparents of seizing the moment and shaping the future.
Of course, this Airport would not be taking shape, at least not now or in this way, without the efforts of The Daily Telegraph and its redoubtable editor Paul Whittaker.
Big decisions need strong advocates as well as strong leaders.
As western Sydney’s champion, Paul has splendidly side-stepped any editorial tendency to create a chorus of complaint.
Tonight, we remember John Bradfield for his bridges, railways and roads, but should not forget the dams he built as well.
A government determined to end the analysis-paralysis that’s delayed western Sydney’s airport should also end the dam-phobia of the past thirty years.
Dams, after all, are the cheaper, more environmentally friendly alternative to the desalination plants which Bob Carr once called bottled electricity.
We shouldn’t forget that aviation was also one of John Bradfield’s interests.
One way to sustain enthusiasm for the new airport could be to name it after a champion for Sydney and I can’t think of a better candidate than John Bradfield. I suspect that many other Sydneysiders might think so, too, and I hope that finding out might be something that the Telegraph will take up.
So, it’s too soon to say of airport decision-making that it’s all over bar the shouting.
The predictable objections might slow it down but they won’t stop it because it is so obviously an idea whose time has come.
The announcement generated far less opposition than expected.
Perhaps western Sydney’s growth has made the need for its own airport almost self-evident; perhaps people are now resolved to be larger and better this time than the last time this issue was considered; perhaps we are now readier to take the longer view and negotiate difficulties rather than be defeated by them.
In any event, it’s a new sign of purpose in our national life that this government is determined to build upon.
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