Western Sydney has seen some planning disasters in its time. There’s a 60-year history of large numbers of people coming to the region well before the jobs and services come. Now we face a new planning challenge: the construction of Sydney’s second international airport at Badgerys Creek, with massive population growth projections for the surrounding Penrith-to-Camden corridor. Yet, seemingly, little has been learned from past mistakes. The NSW government boasts of “building a city the size of Adelaide” in outer Western Sydney – that is, 1.3 million people in the districts west of the M7 motorway. Adelaide has four public hospitals. Under current planning, the new Western Sydney growth corridor will have none. The 2019 state budget failed to allocate a single cent for construction, or even identify the land on which a new hospital could be built. Planning has been restricted to a so-called "integrated health facility" (most […]