Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is great to join the debate on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2006-2007 and cognate bills in the wake of such a well-received, positive and innovative federal budget, and to speak on issues that arise in part out of it and which directly affect my electorate. The No. 1 issue in my electorate, and something that is being resourced through the Commonwealth budget and addressed by the Commonwealth, is the question of dealing with the problems of the Ipswich Motorway. There is continuous commentary on the Ipswich Motorway coming from a range of Labor members in my area. I am sure that the Deputy Speaker would be relieved to hear that these Labor members are not hypocrites in their approach to these matters; they just continually express mutually exclusive views and objectives in the way they present their arguments.

In particular, there is the question of the Goodna bypass, which is overwhelmingly recognised by the people of Ipswich as a good thing. It is time that those people who represented the community of Ipswich and surrounding areas worked for it and did what they could to speed and progress work on the Goodna bypass. Lately I have been very pleased to read some comments from the Mayor of Ipswich, Paul Pisasale. I will quote from the local newspaper, Ipswich’s Own:

Cr. Pisasale said he would be in favour of any bypass option right now. ‘I understand the Federal Government has got to make a decision and as Mayor, I will support any option they choose. It’s their money, I’m happy for them to spend it as they see fit and take responsibility for their choice. And I’m happy to work with the Federal Government. Let’s just get on with it.’

That is a breath of fresh air in the debate compared to what we hear from Labor identities in the Ipswich area.

There has been an awful lot of community support, and I think that the Mayor of Ipswich is finally starting to tap into that when he uses the words that he did in that article. The state government and its generally Labor representatives should give the people of Ipswich and our region a bit more credit than they do. The community is not fooled by the continual delays, incompetence and rhetoric that we get from the Labor Party. The community of Ipswich recognises the benefit of the bypass not just when it comes to the practicality of dealing with traffic in a sensible manner—moving all the heavy interstate freight onto a road designed specifically to cater for it and allowing local traffic full access to the existing Ipswich Motorway. That involves meeting the needs of both types of traffic; facilitating the flow of interstate freight on a route designed for it so it is not going to inconvenience or burden local people, but allowing local people full access to that great road network that currently exists and not closing off exits, as has been proposed by the Labor Party and its Department of Main Roads.

Business in our area recognises the advantages that will come from being able to use a reliable transport corridor that will connect them with where they want to go and allow them to avoid the delays caused by congestion and accidents. The thought of seven years of such delays caused by digging up the road is more than frightening to local businesses, and that is precisely the prescription that the Labor Party and their fellow travellers continually seek to represent to our community. They seek to misrepresent it by trying to tell everybody it would be good for them if the road that they are trying to drive on were dug up. A few people in the community are starting to cut through the Labor dross. The community want trucks out of our suburbs. They want a bypass that will give arterial and heavy traffic an alternative route that does not cut through the middle of our residential suburbs. There is evidence of this in a letter to the editor by a resident of Redbank, Ken Lloyd. The letter was published in the Queensland Times on 14 May, and it was headlined ‘Super highway will ruin homes’. It read:

It is ridiculous for State Transport Minister Paul Lucas to suggest that anybody other than himself and Bernie Ripoll are responsible for ‘betraying’ the residents of Ipswich.

It is their ill-conceived super highway, up to 14 lanes in places, through the residential suburbs of Gailes, Goodna, Redbank and Riverview, that has ‘betrayed’ the voters of these suburbs.

It’s obvious to anyone that has intelligently studied the motorway fiasco that heavy through traffic must be separated from residential areas. A bypass must be built around residential areas to provide a route for heavy traffic that now has no alternative but to pollute our suburbs.

Messrs Lucas and Ripoll should remember that the loyal Labor voters of these suburbs mistakenly believed that they would have their quality of life protected by their elected representatives.

The Federal Member for self-promotion should get off his bike long enough to represent his electorate, not destroy it with his flawed personal agenda.

Those were the words of Ken Lloyd in the Queensland Times. I think he tapped into the concerns of the community and expressed them quite well. The letter also recognises the roughshod manner in which Ipswich residents are being treated by the state government, who despite their pleas to the contrary are determined to push ahead with their upgrade plan—despite the harm it will cause to every motorist, resident and business in the region.

I note that Mr Lloyd talks about 14 lanes in places of this super highway. In order to get the 14 lanes, Mr Lucas would have to count the fact that he is planning to take up ordinary local streets—like Brisbane Terrace and Smith Street—and ram traffic down those streets, as if they were part of the motorway complex. Those streets are currently available to local residents who want to go shopping. That will not be the case under the Lucas and Ripoll plan. You will have all of this through traffic congesting the suburbs in the streets that the residents are entitled to use for their own purposes. The maximum number of lanes on the full length of the motorway itself—that is, if you want to drive from one end to the other—will be six. The maximum number of cars that could drive abreast in each direction will be three. There will be a total of six lanes. You could only get 14 lanes by dragging into the super highway local streets and filling them up with heavy transport, much to the chagrin of concerned residents like Ken Lloyd.

Ken Lloyd makes a mockery of the state minister Paul Lucas’s assurance of 2004, which I mentioned in the chamber earlier this week, that the state government would support the progression of the Goodna Bypass following the feasibility study conducted by Maunsells. In fact, the comments that he made were very reminiscent of those recently made by the mayor. Paul Lucas, the state transport minister, said in his press release:

... Queensland welcomed the appointment of ... Maunsell Australia to independently evaluate the proposed Ipswich northern bypass.

“The Queensland Government will do all in its power to cooperate with the Federal Government in delivering their roads priorities, including the northern bypass,” he said.

“The simple fact is that the Australian Government is providing the money for the national highway and they decide how their money is spent.

“The Queensland Government’s position has always been that we must upgrade the Ipswich Motorway regardless of whether the northern bypass is feasible or not,” Mr Lucas said.

…            …            …

“If the feasibility study indicates the northern bypass is not a viable project, Queensland and the Commonwealth will need to look again at how we address traffic congestion on the Ipswich Motorway.”

Unfortunately, those words escaped from the mouth of Mr Lucas and then—I don’t know—they took them around the back, beat them up and turned them into something else, because, ever since, much to the disappointment and anger of people such as Ken Lloyd, he has been pursuing this stupid upgrade plan of wanting to dig up the road that people are trying to drive on, spend seven years or something like that doing it, take over their over local roads, ram traffic through there and close as many of the local exits as possible. This is completely anti local business and anti the local residents. There are plenty of other locals angry about it and they have been writing letters to the Queensland Times. I could run through a list of those locals, but I do not think I will. What I will talk about is the latest effort by one of the local Labor luminaries to try to pump up some community support for their ridiculous scheme.

The latest effort came from Rachel Nolan, the state member for Ipswich. She has produced what she calls a ‘petition’—a postcard asking for the motorway to be fixed. On one side of the document, she invites those in receipt of this postcard to ‘sign the petition’. But, if you turn it over to where people actually sign, it says ‘names will not be released to any third party’. How can it be a petition, if you are never going to tell anybody who signed it? I think this is a moral quandary for the member for Ipswich. Honestly, I go back to what I said earlier: these members are not hypocrites; they just continually express mutually exclusive views and objectives.

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