Memo Gladys: Parramatta is not Western Sydney

Hardly a week goes by without an announcement that some new infrastructure project is going to Parramatta. Light rail, relocation of historic museums from the city, aquatic centres, government departments, you name it, that part of the metropolitan area has its name on it.

And you know what, good luck to Parramatta.

There should be more money spent on things that make life in Western Sydney better.

The problem is, Parramatta is not Western Sydney.

It definitely isn’t South West Sydney, where if you live in Oran Park it would be quicker to get to Circular Quay than Parramatta.

And therein lies the problem.

Putting infrastructure in Parramatta is not putting infrastructure in Western Sydney, whether it’s Penrith or Blacktown.

It follows that South West Sydney does not benefit either in any shape or form when money is splashed in Parramatta.

It seems to me Parramatta, or the people who promote it, and I know who some of them are, have done an excellent job in pulling the wool over the eyes of bureaucrats and politicians in Macquarie Street.

They have basically sold them a puppy in convincing them that when you spend money in Parramatta you’re spending money in Western Sydney.

It’s a rubbish argument, but to the Eastern Suburbs twerps who looked at Google maps to plan the outer Sydney orbital it must have sounded like pure genius.

What’s worse is that there are people from the neglected parts of the metropolitan area, some of them in influential positions, who have also been sucked in by the powerful Parramatta lobby.

And so it goes on and on, with Parramatta swallowing up most of the State Government infrastructure spending while the rest of Western and South Western Sydney is just ignored.

The time has come for local MPs from those areas to stand up for their people and point out the obvious: what’s good for Parramatta is only good for Parramatta and nobody else.

And, you know, point out the bleeding obvious, that Parramatta is not Camden or Campbelltown or Liverpool and Bankstown.

These places deserve to get their own infrastructure because in any case we’re just not going to travel to Parramatta.

Indeed nobody that I know has got a yen to ever visit Parramatta for anything. The truth is when we decide to go out now and again we head east to Circular Quay.