Westfield West Lakes Car Parking

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee) (15:34): I, too, rise to speak about an issue in my electorate, the electorate of Lee. This is an issue that causes an extraordinary amount of frustration for the local community, and that is the boom gates that are installed at the West Lakes shopping centre. These boom gates, you may know, Mr Speaker, were installed in 2013, the first of their type for any large Westfield-operated shopping centre in metropolitan Adelaide. There were mooted plans to roll out boom gates also at Tea Tree Plaza and Marion.

You can imagine the community response. Residents were outraged. These boom gates were installed at a time when football was already making the transition away from West Lakes at Football Park into the city at Adelaide Oval. The need for the boom gates had evaporated, yet Westfield barrelled on. They put up their plans to have the installation of these boom gates approved and, to the credit of the local council, the City of Charles Sturt, they fought Westfield in the courts to try to stop them installing these boom gates.

Literally thousands of residents campaigned and signed a petition against these boom gates being installed, yet Westfield barrelled on and installed them in 2013. What we have seen for the last six or seven years since these boom gates have been installed has been a debacle for local residents. There are many elderly people in the western suburbs who go to West Lakes who are forced to contend with the difficulty of reaching for and obtaining a parking ticket, the difficulty of having to be responsible for paying for parking if they stay for more than three hours, or even if they exit the car park, having to lean out of their car and use the ticket machines.

But on top of that, of course, staff who were previously able to park in the sealed car park at Westfield at West Lakes have been forced instead to park hundreds of metres away on the now vacated land at Football Park, which means at this time of year in this sort of weather that we are told we are going to experience in the next 24 hours, when it is meant to be windy, it is going to be dark early, it is going to bucket down with rain, we have staff who have to walk hundreds of metres from that unsealed car park just to get to work.

Bear in mind that many of these staff are teenagers. Many of them are young girls with their first job—it could be in retail, it could be in food service or fast food—and Westfield has put these young members of the western suburbs community in an unsafe environment. Of course, what is happening in the car park at the moment? It is barely used. The residents who go there on any day, even on the weekend, must use up somewhere in the order of 15 per cent to 25 per cent of the car park.

Westfield claims, 'We have set aside a little area for staff to park there but we do not want them parking next to the door because that is an inconvenience for people who are coming here for shopping.' So they have created a limited-space area that does not accommodate all staff and, if staff want to park in there because they feel unsafe parking over the road at Football Park, then they have to pay up to $35 a day to do so. It is a parking fee, which I might add has only just been increased.

Of course, it is not just staff car parking which is impacted by these boom gates. There is a bus interchange at Westfield West Lakes as well and bus patronage has plummeted since people have been prevented from parking in the car park and using the bus to get to work, study or their other commitments. To Westfield's credit, they removed the boom gates at the commencement of the coronavirus restrictions; it made sense. They do not want people unnecessarily touching the parking equipment and risking the spread of germs.

Those boom gates are still off and I wrote to Westfield several weeks ago asking them to leave them off because in the period of time that those boom gates have been off we have had both staff and shoppers park in the car park. Does the car park get full? No. Is there a lack of room for people to park at the car park? No. Are more people able to use the bus services because they can park next to the interchange? Yes. The benefits from removing these boom gates have been terrific, and what did Westfield reply to me at the end of last week and what have they confirmed to the media today? They are putting the boom gates back in on Monday 6 July.

All we would ask is that this corporate behemoth do the right thing by the very people they ask to shop in their shopping centres: remove these boom gates and start showing some respect to the residents of the western suburbs again.