Western Sydney Airport’s environmental budget blowout

The second airport at Badgerys Creek will require nearly $500 million to address issues to do with environmental correctness.

Minister for Urban Infrastructure and Cities Paul Fletcher, left, with Paul O'Sullivan, chair of WSACO on the site of the new Western Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek. Picture: John Feder.

The federal government’s planned second commercial passenger airport at Badgerys Creek in Sydney’s west will require nearly half a billion dollars of public expenditure to address issues not to do with infrastructure construction but environmental correctness and compensation for noise.

Senators gasped when told by officers of the recently established Western Sydney Airport Corporation at a Senate estimates hearing today there was an allocation for a basket of non-construction matters set down at $444.9 million, out of a total budget estimated at $5 billion to $6 billion.

Within this, the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee heard, $75 million had been allocated for a “noise amelioration package”, while other elements included “flight path delivery” and environmental offsets.

As previously revealed by The Australian, the plan includes a $180 million “biodiversity offset package” to make up for clearing “small pockets of open eucalypt woodland and shrub land” that the government had identified as being in “generally poor condition”.

WSA Co’s chairman, Paul O’Sullivan, told the hearing “we do not see this as building a piece of infrastructure and that’s it.”

Rather, Mr O’Sullivan told the senators, WSA wanted to address environmental and other community concerns and needs.

“We want to be a symbol of the western Sydney community that they can be proud of,” Mr O’Sullivan said.

Under questioning from Greens Senator Janet Rice, WSA Co chief executive Graham Millett said that while a rail corridor had been allowed for, there was no current plan to have a rail link installed at the start of operations scheduled for 2026, although a scoping study was underway for western Sydney’s overall future rail needs.

The last house on the site of the new Western Sydney Airport at Badgerys Creek is demolished. Picture: John Feder.

“The airport will have excellent public access,” Mr Millett told the hearing, saying major road construction in Sydney’s west would provide it.

“The airport is not dependent on rail for its economic sustainability,” he said.

The committee heard that airspace and flight corridors have yet to be determined.

The airport is designed as a small- to medium-sized domestic and international facility that will handle about 10 million passengers a year, compared to Sydney’s Kingsford Smith which is running at about 42 million passengers a year.

Earlier this month WSA Co announced it had invited registrations of interest for the first and largest of the major works packages for the delivery of the airport, including the movement of more than 20 million cubic metres of earth and the construction of a 3.7 kilometre runway, capable of handling the world’s largest passenger plane, the A380.