Alliance welcomes inquiry into Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill.

In November 2021 the Alliance for Public Parklands welcomed the news that the NSW Upper House decided to send the highly contested Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill to a Parliamentary inquiry in 2022.

Impassioned speeches by MPs in the lower house outlined the distrust communities have, from Maroubra to Mulgoa, of the new Trust proposed by the Planning Minister Rob Stokes, to manage all public parklands in Greater Sydney.

The Member for Blacktown, Stephen Bali, brought to the forefront the huge issue that 5000ha + Western Sydney Parklands (25 times bigger than Centennial Park) is being used as the cash cow by this government instead of being nurtured as a biodiversity corridor. When it was announced in 2004 by the then Premier Bob Carr, he said that "it would become the lungs of the area and remain off-limits to developers."

"This is far more complex an issue than coffee carts at Callan Park, which the government seems to narrow their narrative around. We are talking about legislation that will allow private corporations to run our public green open space," a spokesperson for the Alliance for Public Parklands Suzette Meade said.

"We hope the upper house inquiry into the Greater Sydney Parklands Trust Bill will shine a light on so many unanswered questions about the governance of public parks and how and why the GSP has already had unilateral powers to remove existing trustee boards of Centennial and Parramatta Parks and replace them with a new one size fits all board out of the Department of Planning." Suzette Meade added

The Alliance for Public Parklands is confident that with Shooters and Fishers' Robert Borsak as chair of the Parliamentary inquiry, we will get to the bottom of this legislation's true intent, and the committee will deliver a set of recommendations that this government will adopt.