Fed: When an airport is pie in the sky

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Fed: When an airport is pie in the sky

By Joe Hildebrand

SYDNEY, Aug 1 AAP - "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has everproduced the expression `as pretty as an airport'. Airports are ugly." - Douglas Adams,The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Airports are ugly. They are physically ugly and they are politically ugly. But everycity needs one and, according to some, Sydney needs two.

Where this second airport would be located has been debated for the past 50 years,with the Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and most recently Howard governments all shelvingthe decision.

Few groups of people are as aware of the problem as the Australian Labor Party, andit has bane of the ALP since the Hawke Government flagged Badgerys Creek as a possiblesite in 1985.

Simon Crean's sudden backflip on the weekend put paid to that solution and simultaneouslyraised the problem from the dead.

But with the removal of Badgerys as an option (at least where Labor is concerned) itis now all but certain that there will be no second airport in the Sydney basin.

There are several reasons for this. One is the prohibitive cost of acquiring developedland on the scale needed for such a facility. Another is the requisite associated projectssuch as road and rail links which would also cost billions.

And there is the environmental argument, stressed heavily during debate about Badgerysand now widely believed to apply to any greater Sydney site.

"It would be an environmental disaster to have two major airports inside the Sydneybasin," Mr Crean's parliamentary secretary and inner-Sydney MP John Murphy said.

But the most powerful argument for any party is that it would be political death inthe surrounding seats, which is why neither the federal government nor opposition arenaming any names.

"It's pretty straightforward," one NSW government staffer told AAP.

"It will out and out annoy the hell out of people wherever it's built."

So if not within metropolitan Sydney, then where? Virtually every location flaggedhas its problems.

The RAAF base at Richmond is susceptible to fog and surrounded by birdlife. Furthermore,it is flanked by a town on one side and mountains on the other, making construction ofa second - perpendicular - runway impossible.

Darkes Forest, between Sydney and Wollongong, is also regarded by some as too foggy too often.

Locating it on the plains around Goulburn would be too far and require a very fastrail link to be feasible. Again, pricey.

Bringelly, once an option, is now at the centre of a massive NSW government developmentplan which may end with a quarter of a million people living there - much to the chagrinof federal Labor.

Perhaps the best site is at Wilton, 20km south of Campbelltown. Situated near a motorwayand rail link and within striking distance of the city it would seem a logical choiceand was runner-up to Badgerys in the last selection process.

But that is presuming Sydney does indeed require another major gateway.

The federal government has taken the politically astute position that Sydney doesn'tneed a second airport at all - at least not for the foreseeable future.

This is supported by the operators of Sydney Airport itself. SACL chief executive MaxMoore-Wilton says the airport has the capacity and infrastructure planning to cope withprojected growth in Sydney's domestic and international passenger traffic for the forseeablefuture.

SACL draft master plan for the next 20 years of development at the airport forecastsa tripling of passenger numbers to 68.3 million by 2023/24, when there would be around412,000 aircraft movements each year.

But the government's position is also a cynical one: At a time when the tourism industryis desperately trying to attract visitors to the country - in the wake of the September11 terrorist attacks and the SARS epidemic - the government is banking on the fact thatgrowth won't happen soon.

Furthermore, the inner-western Sydney seats most affected by aircraft noise are sosafely Labor it is scarcely worth the coalition's while trying to woo voters there.

Indeed, Simon Crean has been accused of feeling the same way in the wake of his BadgerysCreek decision, which guarantees no respite for residents underneath flight paths.

But the point remains salient. The events of 2001 were not predicted by those championinga second airport for Australia's largest city and may be only a temporary pause in thegrowth of air travel.

But equally unforeseen was the advent of the new generation of huge aircraft such asthe Airbus 380 series which will transport more passengers without increasing the frequencyof traffic.

But Sydney Airport has previously said it will take 10 years for passenger numbersto reach the heady heights of early 2001 in the afterglow of the Olympics.

By that time it may well be that superjumbos are the norm in international air traveland the government's cautious wait-and-see position will have paid off.

It would be a relief to both parties: airports, unlike airplanes, are tough to getoff the ground.

AAP jh/jc/mk/jlw

KEYWORD: NEWSCOPE NSW