Greg Barila: Time to relocate Parafield airport away from suburban setting

HAVE you heard about Adelaide’s hot new shopping centre? It has an airport on it! And it’s just a short drive north of the city.

Methode Byline headshots, Greg Barila Picture: Clayton Nick

BALLOON animals and bouncy castles, face-painting and sausage sizzles. Plenty of businesses rely on gimmicks to help pull the punters through the doors.

But have you heard about Adelaide’s hot new shopping centre? It has an airport on it!

And it’s just a short drive north of the city at Parafield.

People sometimes stupidly mistake Parafield for an airport with some shops on it. But if you’ve been anywhere near the place in recent years, you’ll see clearly that Parafield is actually a shopping centre where small planes are sometimes allowed to land.

I drove by recently for the first time in years and was shocked at the number of new stores.

At the same time, housing has continued to spread aggressively around the margins of the airport, particularly at Mawson Lakes, which has gone from a fledgling suburb to a quasi-city centre in the space of a decade.

This rampant development has served to box the airport in, a trend the local member and former mayor of Salisbury Tony Zappia noted in Federal Parliament in 2012.

At the time of its establishment circa 1930, he said, “the airport’s location was considered to be relatively remote and well outside of Adelaide’s residential areas”.

“Over the years, Adelaide’s urban sprawl has resulted in Parafield Airport being in the middle of suburbia, surrounded by residential, recreation, industrial and business areas.”

The tension has not just been theoretical.

As a young Messenger reporter in Salisbury in the mid-2000s, I spent much of my time reporting on the chronic problem of airport noise – the near constant buzzing of training planes running circuits over nearby suburbs and attempts by fed-up locals to get them to buzz off.

With 250,000 flight movements a year, Parafield is one of the busiest general airports in the country, providing pilot training for airlines that include Virgin and Cathay Pacific.

It supports almost 2000 fulltime jobs and in the next 20 years is expected to support a thousand more while tipping about $300m into the economy.

Parafield supporters are quick to remind angry residents the airport came first. But that plane has flown. The airport is now surrounded by suburbs.

So why not relocate it?

For almost 30 years Salisbury Council has been keen to see the airport shifted to make way for housing. In 2010, then Transport Minister Anthony Albanese rejected the airport’s 20-year Master Plan, saying operators Adelaide Airport Limited failed to properly consult the community or provide accurate information about future plane movements.

But, according to AAL, he also gave “gold-plated” assurances the airport would not be shifted and two years later approved the plan, calling the place “a vital piece of aviation infrastructure”.

It is because Parafield is so “vital” to the economy that it must be relocated – to a newly remote location where it can grow and expand for the next 100 years, away from urban and commercial pressures.

Because unless we decide to cover the whole site with big-box stores and let the planes land on top, the airport, with its excellent safety record, will remain on course for a collision with the competing interests of a growing city it simply won’t be able to avoid.