Anger mounts before building starts at huge new hub
There has been outrage and ire at a community meeting to discuss a big new freight hub proposal for Sydney.
Emotions ran high at a public consultation session for the massive 24-hour, seven-day-a-week intermodal freight hub planned to sit between the Georges River, the M5 motorway and the rapidly growing south-west Sydney suburbs of Wattle Grove and Chipping Norton.
The NSW Planning and Environment Department has green-lit the plan, so the project is now going through approvals by the Planning Assessment Commission.
The recent meeting at the Wattle Grove Community Centre was the final opportunity for locals to voice their support or opposition to the hub, before the PAC makes its decision.
A majority of the public comments were in opposition.
“You're talking about bringing trucks from the eastern suburbs and putting them out here in the south-west,” Liverpool Council Mayor Ned Mannoun said.
“Anyone who uses the M5 is going to be stuck in significant amounts of traffic and no-one is talking about how we're actually going to solve that.
“It will go down as one of the stupidest mistakes we can make in Sydney,” he said.
“There's around 25,000 people who live in a close proximity to this proposal, this should not be done near a residential area.”
Freight firms Aurizon and Qube Holdings, have formed a combined body dubbed the Sydney Intermodal Terminal Alliance (SIMTA), which has bid to build and operate the hub.
SIMTA wants the freight hub to run around the clock.
Operations would see about 500,000 shipping containers transported by rail from Port Botany every year, and up to 800,000 shipping containers by 2026.
The site will be used to transfer the containers to trucks before embarking to their final destinations.
But this may just be that start of the new freight centre.
The Federal Government is looking to build its own intermodal hub directly opposite the SIMTA site.
The two sites would cover an area of more than 300 hectares combined, and together would have the capacity to move over two million shipping containers per year.
The Commonwealth and SIMTA are negotiating over who might run the two sites, and whether they could be merged into a single freight transport titan.