Future metro rail extensions in Sydney kicked further down track

Premier Chris Minns has sought to lower expectations that another set of metro rail lines will be built in Sydney in coming years, citing their massive expense and drag on the state budget, as he faces cost blowouts and delays to opening a new line to the city’s next international airport.

In some of his strongest remarks, Minns said the government would need financial help if it were to embark on the construction of new metro extensions to Macarthur in the south-west and other parts of the city.

“It must be done with help and, ultimately, I’m not going to promise projects that we can’t fund. We don’t have the funding … at the moment,” he said.

While he accepted that many communities would love a new metro line, Minns said the one under construction to Western Sydney Airport was twice as expensive as the airport itself, and it would be a “false promise” to declare that his government was about to extend the line to Macarthur.

“We’re limited by what we can afford – what taxpayers can afford,” he said.

“No one should be under any illusion that right now we’re at full capacity when it comes to what’s deliverable and what’s buildable in NSW today.”

Minns reiterated that he would not be selling public assets to fund new rail lines like the former Coalition government had, citing its sale of electricity assets last decade to pay for the M1 metro line between Sydney’s north-west and Bankstown.

“We will not privatise government assets to build metros,” he said.

In addition, he said that state Labor would not be repeating decisions years ago to promise projects which “did not see the light of day”.

The federal government has committed $1 billion to secure rail corridors between Bradfield and both Leppington and Macarthur. The state and federal governments are also jointly spending about $100 million on a business case into rail extensions in the south-west.

Federal Transport Minister Catherine King said people should be in no doubt that metro or heavy rail extensions would cost “billions and billions”.

“We’re all operating in constrained budget circumstances. We’re being very careful about that,” she said on Tuesday.

“I’ve got billions of dollars of asks in my home state of Victoria. I am deeply envious as someone who has used the rail line to Kingsford-Smith [Airport] regularly when I’m in Sydney. You’ve got this new rail line here to this airport. We are yet to have one to Tullamarine [Airport in Melbourne].”

The metro line between St Marys and Bradfield via Western Sydney Airport was originally due to open at the same time as the first passenger planes take off late next year.

However, the Herald has previously revealed that a dispute between a private consortium building the metro line and the state government risks delaying its opening until the end of December 2027 and blowing out the project’s cost by $2.2 billion.

Minns said the government had yet to settle the dispute with the consortium known as Parklife Metro, but insisted that it would be “vigorously defending NSW taxpayers”.

“Those commercial arrangements will be worked out. I’m not going to front-run or speculate on those negotiations,” he said.

Minns said delays to the opening of the metro line were a “concern for us” but did not anticipate it would be delayed by a year. “If we miss it, it won’t be by an astronomical amount,” he said.

The new airport rail line has been budgeted to cost $11 billion, to be jointly funded by the state and federal governments. The mega-project was savaged in 2021 by the country’s peak infrastructure adviser, which warned that the cost of the line would far outweigh the benefits.

The state is also developing a business case for a metro extension between St Marys and Tallawong, where it would connect to the existing M1 metro line.

A confidential review of Sydney’s metro projects has previously proposed completing an extension of the airport metro line from Bradfield to “Bradfield South” by 2032 at a cost of $2.3 billion, as well as a heavy rail line from Leppington to Bradfield South by 2033 for $4.6 billion.

Under the review’s scenarios, they would be followed by a northern extension of the airport metro line from St Marys to Schofields by 2037, costing $9.6 billion, and on to Tallawong by 2039 for a further $3.2 billion.

Freight aircraft are due to start flying to Western Sydney Airport by the middle of next year, followed by passenger planes towards the end of 2026.

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