Ross Cameron March 8, 2013
"There's a wind of change blowing in the west. And it threatens to demolish all 10 seats Labor holds there by less than 10 per cent." Photo: Andrew Meares
With Prime Minister Julia Gillard in Sydney's west the past week, it seems timely to update some of the tired old clichés about this area.
In my youth, ''westie'' was a term of derision that the sons and daughters of privilege applied to the vast unwashed beyond Ashfield. When the Manly Sea Eagles played Western Suburbs Magpies, it was the ''silvertails versus the fibros''. A cough in the scrum would elicit ''Is that asbestos?''
Inner-city Sydneysiders seldom ventured beyond Parramatta, except on their way to the ski fields. Now the region generates some $85 billion a year from more than 720,000 jobs. Whole streets of Oatlands and Strathfield start at $1 million a house and sometimes rise beyond $4 million; many built by Lebanese Maronite developers, who embody the saying ''busy as a brickie in Beirut''.
These are the people who do not like Julia Gillard. Their newly chic suburbs don't enjoy menu options of regular train, bus and ferry services to the city. Commuters living in the north west can easily pay $125 a week in tolls for the privilege of driving to work (M7, M2, Lane Cove Tunnel and Harbour Bridge variable). In western Sydney 22 per cent of workers allegedly spend more time in traffic than on annual leave. It is claimed that up to $5 billion of productivity is wasted while people sit in cars in Sydney's west, battling a road network so brittle that one accident on the M5 motorway can turn the city into a parking lot. Road congestion leaves plenty of time for drivers to tune into commercial radio evangelists like Alan Jones and Ray Hadley - no friends of Labor.
Another key fact that has reshaped western Sydney is the migration required to counter Australia's low birth rate; from China (which has overtaken Britain as our biggest immigrant source), India, Sri Lanka, eastern Europe, South Korea, the Philippines and the Middle East.
Fifty per cent of Parramatta local government area residents speak a language other than English at home. New arrivals want to live close to jobs in the Sydney CBD. But to get a foot-hold in the property market, they must go west. Unlike their Anglo neighbours, they are happy to start work at 7-Eleven or KFC or driving a taxi. They have a long-term view - the parents will provide an economic beachhead, the children will go to university. The beachhead is a 30-year mortgage on a three-bedroom flat in Fairfield and a combined household median income of $110,000. These people care about interest rates and job security.
They come from developing countries and have not yet let go of faith and family as the base of community. They prefer Kevin and Therese to Julia and Tim (especially the Chinese - Rudd's September 2007 address to APEC in Sydney, in perfect Mandarin, marked the end of the Howard era).
They take a keen interest in the quality of their children's education and pay for the coaching required to win a place in a state selective school. If they miss out, the parents work overtime to afford a low-fee Christian or Catholic systemic school - where surnames like Zhiang, Kim, Nguyen and Singh play violin solos and win most of the prizes.
Parents agonise over how fast children swap the strict values of their birthplace for the relaxed, secular banquet of Australian choice. Mothers in saris remonstrate with their daughters in Supre.
They have no time or inclination to join the scouts, Rotary or the P&C. Their attitude to boat arrivals is clear: stop them. Because the bitter truth is their extended family members have been repeatedly rejected for Australian visits and migration under strict skilled or family reunion categories. (I was once required to intervene on behalf of a Sri Lankan couple, both at first refused visitor visas to attend the marriage of their Australian-citizen son - 400 guests were attending the wedding).
Media organisations struggle to understand the region's nuances, reaching instead for shorthand grabs of drive-by shootings in the south-west and public housing riots in Shalvey and Mount Druitt.
Western Sydney is the epicentre of Australia's most ambitious and upwardly mobile cohort. They cannot be mobilised by the politics of underclass grievance. They care little about byzantine political factions, carbon footprints, claims of misogyny or trade union membership. They want to get ahead.
After a sweltering Sydney summer day, the afternoon southerly sea breeze may not make it all the way to Campbelltown. But there's a wind of change blowing in the west. And it threatens to demolish all 10 seats Labor holds there by less than 10 per cent.
Ross Cameron was the Liberal MP for Parramatta from 1996 to 2004.
Time to lose clichés: the western suburbs are serious business
