John Anderson (Gwydir, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think I can remember that. The three areas that I would like to touch on are AusLink, water and regional services. In relation to AusLink, it seems extraordinary to me that the country waited for well over 100 years from the time when we became a nation to get to the point where we could really say we had a genuinely integrated, thought-through approach to a national transport infrastructure backbone for the country. That is what AusLink is, and it was initially funded to the tune of some $12 billion. That has been pushed up in this budget to $15 billion or $16 billion. To put that into some perspective, those are expenditures that will basically be released over the budget cycle—or actually five years in the case of AusLink; a little longer than normal budget cycles. It contrasts with the Snowy Mountains Scheme, which we have heard a lot of in recent days—and I understand why, because of its place in the hearts and minds of Australians who are very keen on infrastructure. They often say, ‘The government should do another Snowy Mountains Scheme.’ In fact, the expenditures under AusLink, at $15 billion or $16 billion over the next four or five years, contrast interestingly with the cost in today’s money of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, of an estimated $6 billion. So there is serious infrastructure expenditure unfolding across the nation. The fact that the federal government is not the primary provider of infrastructure to the nation—the states are—highlights just how much activity is indeed beginning to unfold.

The national highway grid is very much to the fore in people’s thinking about AusLink and the federal government’s responsibilities. I am delighted to note that the Western Sydney Orbital was opened just before Christmas. I think it is something of a reflection—and my colleague on my right, the member for Cook, will understand this—of how rapidly you become a feather duster and forgotten in the scheme of things, that someone, I am sure inadvertently, overlooked to even invite me to it. I put the whole thing together; it was a massive piece of construction and the first time we had ever tolled part of the national highway. It is a brilliant piece of infrastructure, brought in ahead of time and on budget, greatly to the credit of the constructors. It is making a very great difference to economic development, people’s convenience, fuel savings and so forth—despite having to pay the tolls—in the Sydney region. It is a brilliant piece of infrastructure. That is the sort of roadwork that will be needed. There has been more than enough talk about the Pacific and the Hume, but to see those progressing is obviously also important—even though the Pacific is, strictly speaking, not a Commonwealth responsibility, it will now progress.

A major plank of AusLink’s approach is that the nation needs an export- and interstate-oriented transport network that the states by definition have no real interest in providing. So we are about interstate and international connectivity. That is the neatest way to describe the federal government’s responsibility in transport infrastructure. The reality is that you cannot do it properly on a road system alone; you need decent freight rail linkages. That—and my colleague here on my right, the member for Hinkler, has been deeply engaged in debates about rail for a very long time—is included in AusLink as well. You are seeing very substantial institutional reforms and injections of capital into the Australian Railtrack Corporation and all that it represents. That is presiding over a magnificent improvement in the performance of rail in this country. It was needed. Currently—and I do not think my figures are out of date—on a simple tonnage-carried basis, and I warn that that is the basis on which I am making these remarks, the rail network is carting around 17 per cent or 18 per cent of the nation’s freight volumes. That is about all the current network can actually carry.

But the AusLink improvements over the next five years will see that rise quite dramatically to probably 35 or 36 per cent. At that point the current corridors are likely to be pretty close to saturation, in my view. We will know a lot more when the report into the north-south rail corridors, which I commissioned in my last days as Deputy Prime Minister, is released in the next few months. But it is likely that at around 45 per cent the rail network will be at saturation level. I hope major new corridors, a sensible proposition where an inland emerges, come to fruition. As a result a major inland corridor will be needed up and down the east coast of Australia.

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