The first stage of the airport, including a 3.7km east-west runway, is expected to open in mid-2020s but initially without rail link

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Malcolm Turnbull has promised work on a rail connection to Sydney’s second airport would begin when the Badgerys Creek airport opens or soon afterwards as he prepared to sign off on the plans.

Turnbull said as an “enthusiastic devotee of rail infrastructure in western Sydney”, he would be looking at the rail options carefully but a train connection would not open at the same time as the airport. The airport is is expected to open by the mid-2020s.

“We are looking at the options for rail very, very carefully with the aim of ensuring that rail connectivity for the airport will ideally commence when the airport opens and, if not, as soon thereafter as possible,” Turnbull said.

The urban infrastructure minister Paul Fletcher said the airport would be “rail ready”. Plans include a box for a future station, a corridor for the rail designed across the airport location and space for a future terminal and facilities.

He said the Turnbull government was working with the NSW Baird government on a scoping study for rail across Western Sydney, including a Western Sydney airport.

But Labor’s Anthony Albanese said the plan for the airport - discussed for almost 40 years - needed public transport from day one.

He said the Badgerys Creek Airport had the potential to be an economic gamechanger for Western Sydney and the national economy.

“We need...to make sure that we get it right,” Albanese said. “We need to have public transport access from day one that the airport opens.”

Albanese called on the government to ensure that the economic benefits were maximised and the environmental impact is minimised.

“We can do that, for example, by making sure that no communities are flown over at night and that’s possible because of the protections that were put in place around Badgerys Creek Airport by the Hawke Government way back in the 1980s,” Albanese said.

The 1,800ha site at Badgerys Creek in western Sydney will initially service about 10 million passengers a year, making it the size of Adelaide airport, from the mid-2020s.



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A sitemap for “stage one” includes a 3,700m east-west runway, a domestic, international and cargo terminal, and a tunnel earmarked for a future underground rail link. It would take eight years to build and take 10 million passengers annually at a cost of $4bn.

By 2050 a second 3,700m runway would be complete, with the airport forecast to take 80 million passengers annually – about twice the number who now pass through Sydney airport.

The federal minister for infrastructure, Paul Fletcher, said: “The new airport will be a major generator of jobs and economic activity for western Sydney, both during construction but also once it is operational.”

The Qantas chief executive, Alan Joyce, said Sydney needed the second airport at Badgerys Creek because Kingsford Smith airport was already operating at capacity.

“We are hopeful the airport will be open and running by the mid-2020s, and we are very keen on having that expansion,” he told Network Seven on Monday. “Sydney is already full, Kingsford Smith is full, we have called for this capacity for sometime. With operations taking place hopefully from the mid-20s, which will be great for Sydney, NSW and Australia,” he said.

But Mark Greenhill, mayor of the Blue Mountains Council, said the federal government’s plan had been released without flight paths and that the Badgerys Creek site had been a bad idea since the 1970s when it was first proposed.

“If this is Malcolm Turnbull’s idea of a Christmas present, I want to take it back on Boxing Day,” he told the ABC.

“At the end of the day, what they’ve announced is an airport but no flight paths. We still don’t know where the planes will be flying. That’s how incomplete this job is.”

Previous government estimates claimed the initial construction phase would generate about 4,000 jobs, while the airport development will create 35,000 jobs by 2035, increasing to 60,000 jobs over time.



Sydney’s second airport has been stuck in a mire of politics for 40 years. Successive governments have refused to make a decision because of political sensitivities about noise, infrastructure and amenity.



Badgerys Creek was first recommended in 1979 but it was not until the mid-80s that the Hawke government began acquiring land at the site. But the political appetite waned and both parties ruled it out.



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A second site at Wilton was considered but was ruled out because it was further from the Sydney central business district and required greater development.

A joint federal-state report released in 2012 found the result of doing nothing about a second airport was lost jobs, lost economic growth, traffic gridlock, nationwide aviation delays and increased aircraft noise.



The report concluded: “If action is not taken quickly the chance to secure the future of aviation for the Sydney region may be lost altogether … the option of doing nothing is no longer available and the costs of deferring action are unacceptable.”



The report found Kingsford Smith airport would run out of space by 2027, with peak times in the morning and late afternoon filled by 2020. The authors said by 2060 the lack of capacity would result in almost $60bn in forgone expenditure and 57,000 jobs forgone in that year alone.