Resurrection Brewing to the South !

The southern end of the West Connex road system is planned to create a distribution hub at St Peters and this will contain a massive terminal to consolidate freight from Port Botany and the southern sea terminal at Port Kembla.  What is missing is the proposed link, which was termed the " Sydney Gateway " to connect this terminal with Port Botany and take trucks off the southern suburbs local roads.   This was discontinued on the basis of cost when the estimate came in at $ 2.6 billion.

The people who live to the south of Sydney have every reason to feel they are the " poor relations " when it comes to government spending.   The glaring anomaly is the missing link to connect West Connex with the existing F6 divided road expressway that runs from Waterfall to Wollongong.

Sydney is connected to the north and the west by such an expressway system but to the south it remains a protected piece of reserved land with no commencement date for work to begin.  The southern commute into the city has to crawl along the old Princes Highway and General Holmes Drive.

It gets worse going south past Wollongong.   The Princes Highway that connects to the Victorian border is basically a meandering strip of bitumen offering a single lane each way and that is the only access for residents of the burgeoning array of holiday resorts and farm communities that cling to the ocean seabord of this state,

There is a rail connect from Nowra to Sydney but that is little changed from the days of steam trains. The electric trains have to climb over the escarpment north of Wollongong and that is a system constructed with pick and shovel, horse and carts in an earlier century.  The trains slow to walking pace as they cross deep gorges and travel through tunnels.

Sydney is getting new light rail trams and a new transit rail system, and giant boring machines are constructing tunnels under the harbour and between suburbs, but there are no plans to create a tunnel through the escarpment to create a fast rail link to Sydney.

The reason the south misses out on government spending is classical politics.  In the past, the vote for the Australian Labor party in the Wollongong electorates was overwhelming.  When the Liberals were in office, spending there was simply unproductive.  When Labor was in office they could see no gain because they had the vote from there anyway.

Perhaps the politicians need to have another look to the south. The city of Shellharbour is expanding at an amazing rate and farmland near Jamberoo is disappearing under new housing suburbs.  The politicians ignore these growing numbers at their peril.

Dumping massive truck movements on the suburban infrastructure of council roads in the south could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. This massive population surge and its housing component is well on the way to creating a new voting pattern.