Debate resumed from an earlier hour.

The Hon. CHARLIE LYNN [3.34 p.m.]: The political links between this Labor Government and developers needs to be examined during debate on this bill. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the Minister for Planning has detractors within her own party who accuse her not only of delivering much of the Tripodi-Obeid agenda—an agenda that was resisted by Morris Iemma and Frank Sartor with fatal political consequences for both of them—but also of accommodating the Urban Taskforce, which is regarded as the most aggressively anti-regulation group of the developer mates lobby groups. Unlike associations in the industry, its membership is by invitation only. One can only imagine the joy of receiving an invitation from Joe and Eddie! The former Minister for Planning, Frank Sartor, regards it as the least credible of the property lobbies.

The co-founder of the task force is David Tanevski, who is a key player with a long association with Labor. He has been mates with Joe Tripodi for many years, and the two are veterans of past Labor branch-stacking battles. The director of the task force is Aaron Gadiel, a former chief of staff to both Joe Tripodi and the Hon. Eddie Obeid. The new Minister for Planning, Kristina Keneally, has a strong personal allegiance to Joe Tripodi because he delivered the numbers for her preselection. Her husband, Ben, was a friend of Joe Tripodi's at the University of Sydney. The Taliban would envy this network.

The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that its sources believed Joe Tripodi, the Hon. Eddie Obeid and their front organisation, the Urban Taskforce, wanted particular developers outside the planning protocols of the Growth Centres Commission to jump the queue. One does not have to be a Rhodes Scholar to identify Labor's developer mates. The invitation list for developer donors who attended a fundraising dinner in support of Labor mayor Nick Lalich when he ran for the seat of Cabramatta in the recent by-election is a veritable who's who of Labor mates. Some of them could have walked straight out of the set of Underbelly! These developers have a lot of political clout in south-western Sydney's Labor circles. Overdevelopment in western Sydney is obviously not one of the major concerns, but we have a responsibility to stop any attempt to rape our heritage and diminish the quality of agricultural education in this State.

Last year the Department of Primary Industries objected to a school being developed on prime agricultural land in Camden because of its detrimental impact on diminishing viable agricultural land. The department emphasised the importance of protecting scarce agricultural land from urban encroachment in the Sydney Basin. Unfortunately the Treasurer's vision for a parcel of land like Hurlstone Agricultural High School is limited to the number of housing blocks and shops that his developer mates can put on it. The proposed development of the land will increase the burden on local infrastructure, which already is at capacity. Glenfield is already congested and does not have the infrastructure to cope with more development. Local hospital waiting times are painfully long and the M5 Motorway cannot cope with the daily demand.

The Government obviously has thought about the problems it faces in meeting its obligations to its developer mates and so organised a smoke and mirrors strategy to dupe the public in regard to its real intentions. Its first challenge was to create a perception that it is at arms length from the land grab. This was done by announcing an independent public inquiry. The second problem would be how to limit the collateral damage to their local parliamentary representative Dr Andrew McDonald. This would be done by arranging for Dr McDonald to call for the independent public inquiry, and get the Government to agree to his call. On 17 February the local Macarthur newspapers announced "an independent public inquiry into the planned land sell-off at Hurlstone Agricultural High School".

True to form and right on cue, the local member, Dr Andrew McDonald, chimed in and said, " the question of land use on the Hurlstone site has to be resolved once and for all". Dr McDonald said he was confident that the Premier and the Minister for Education and Training, Verity Firth, would agree. And sure enough, during the following week on 24 February the Minister for Education and Training announced that both she and the Premier, Nathan Rees, would back Dr McDonald's call for an independent and public inquiry. The Minister gushed that "whoever chaired it would be independent". Yeah, sure!

We now know that the Government already had drawn up plans to have an inquiry into the sale, with the terms of reference and a draft list of names of participants having been drawn up in February—long before Dr Andrew McDonald proposed an inquiry and Verity Firth said, "What a great idea!" All that was missing from these documents was the outcome of the inquiry. Any Minister who needs a public inquiry to understand the value of an agricultural educational facility that is accessible to students from western Sydney and rural New South Wales is a dunce. The Minister's assurance that the chair of the inquiry would be independent is pure folly. Such a person does not exist in this State. After 13 years of Labor rule, under the ruthless influence of Joe Tripodi and the Hon. Eddie Obeid, any such person either has been gelded politically or they are completely compliant with the outcomes that Labor wishes to achieve. We know that the Government's spin doctors would have monitored the local media to see if the locals had swallowed the subterfuge of a so-called independent inquiry. No doubt they would have been disappointed at a posting from "Independent" on the website, who advised:

It seems like this inquiry has been put together to save Andrew McDonald not Hurlstone. How unusual for an inquiry to have an 'investigation' arm to it. Where will these experts come from? Will they be truly independent? Why, when the sale was first announced did then government say that it was the sale of 'surplus' land? Now the school is going to be 'compared' to other selective schools, James Ruse, Farrah and Yanco to ensure they are 21st century whatever that means? I don't know of one public school that you could consider 21st century. They simply do not have the funds to have 21st-century facilities. It would seem now the school has demonstrated that there is no surplus land they want to find a method to sell Hurlstone. This government can not be trusted. They have lied and deceived this State for far too long and this witch hunt has been designed to allow the local members to stand up and say look at what I got for you. Well we have one message to the government. Hands off our farm and hands off this local greenspace. Hurlstone is not for sale and if one inch of this land is sold then Andrew McDonald and his government can expect it to be an issue at the next election.

And this one from Darlusz:

Rather than sell the farm, how about improving it, and making it an educational resource for schools from all around Sydney to visit. Bus students in from urban schools for a day of education on the farm! This country is built on agriculture, we should be encouraging kids in urban centres to learn about it, and experience it, without travelling for hours to see a real farm.

I do not know Darlusz. I do not know if Darlusz is a he or she, and I do not know where he or she lives. But I do know that Darlusz has displayed more commonsense on this issue than the entire caucus can muster as a collective. If we want students to achieve excellence in our public education system, we should take note of what they have to say, and it is obvious that they are against this proposal. An organisation called Team Macarthur has been heralded as a new power group within the dysfunctional Labor Party. The group comprises the member for Macquarie Fields, the member for Camden, the member for Campbelltown and the member for Wollondilly. If they want to represent their constituents, they can stop the sale by walking into the Premier's office and saying, "It's not on." They did it with electricity privatisation—members opposite did it—and they can do it with Hurlstone school. The question we must ask is this: Do the members of Team Macarthur have the intestinal fortitude to walk in and stop this fire sale and protect the small amount of green belt we have left from Labor's developer mates? It will be interesting to see whether they turn out to be the men of Macarthur or they scurry away as the mice of Macarthur. I tend to think it will be the mice of Macarthur.

The Hon. Michael Gallacher: They're rats.

The Hon. CHARLIE LYNN: Yes, rats in their ranks—they need a few. I challenge those members to stand up and take on the Treasurer. The Treasurer's experience of farm products is a boutique supermarket in Rose Bay, and he thinks Centennial Park is extensive quality farmland. That is all he has got. I challenge the men of Team Macarthur to stand up to the Treasurer and the Premier and stop this land grab and this donation to their Labor mates. Normally there are two sides to most arguments but that is not the case with the Government's plan to sell off the Hurlstone farm. I challenge the Government to provide details of any community benefit or any moral justification for the sale. There will certainly be no improvement to agricultural education, which is the raison d'être of the school.

There is obviously no heritage value in the farm or any value in practical agricultural education in the eyes of the Treasurer. Obviously the Government does not see any value in protecting the last remnant of the once famed green belt separating us from Sydney's ugly urban sprawl. This is just a grubby cash grab in the finest traditions of the New South Wales Labor mates club. The sale is bad for education, bad for agriculture and bad for the local community. I call on members to support this bill and save Hurlstone farm from Labor's greedy developer mates.

Debate adjourned on motion by the Hon. Rick Colless and set down as an order of the day for a future day.