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

I rise to speak once again about the Goodna bypass and the Ipswich Motorway. These projects are essential to the development of the Ipswich region and to the growth corridor moving west from Brisbane. The Goodna bypass is the project put forward by the Commonwealth to resolve the problems and to create sufficient capacity to be able to deal with the immense increase in traffic volumes going into that area. It has been proven by Maunsell engineers, in their first study of the issue, that merely upgrading the existing road cannot provide sufficient capacity to accommodate all the traffic that is heading into that region. It certainly cannot.

The Maunsell study found that the Goodna bypass was essential to provide sufficient capacity. The Commonwealth, to its credit, has been pursuing that with alacrity. I am sad to say that that has not been the case with the state government. They have done everything in their power to be a dog in the manger for the people of Ipswich and the road users. They have sought to disrupt the project. They have sought to put up hastily concocted alternatives that have turned out to be woefully engineered and even more woefully conceived.

I am very pleased to come into the House today to speak about this because of the second Maunsell study. The first study investigated engineering issues to do with the Goodna bypass. The second study will now go on to look at which of the three routes found by the first Maunsell study to be feasible is the one that the Commonwealth should build. It will also proceed to produce all the necessary information that we need to be able to go to tender on that project by the end of the year. I look forward to that.

I can say I look forward to it because I can tell you now I know that the Maunsell report has cleared its first hurdle, which is where the engineers looked at the questions of afflux and undermining to see whether there were any possible engineering impediments to the creation of any one of the three roads. The fact is the project has passed that hurdle with flying colours. It has leaped that hurdle and it has moved forward, as predicted by every engineer who has looked at the project. It is quite a simple project by way of its conception. It is simply a matter of building a road. There are three alternatives, three different routes you could go. As it turns out, we could build all three of them because none of the three has any kind of flaw from an engineering perspective.

That is an important issue because fatal flaws have been a fantasy put forward by the member for Oxley and by the state Minister for Transport and Main Roads in Queensland, Mr Lucas. They have put forward this phantom of fatal flaws in the Goodna bypass to say that it cannot possibly happen, that we should stop it, that we should get in the way of it, that we should not allow it to occur and that we should do what the state government wants. That is a total crock of nonsense. It has been proven that these so-called fatal flaws do not exist. They are the fantasy of the state transport minister, Mr Lucas, and the member for Oxley, Bernie Ripoll.

The first Maunsell report found that all three routes for the Goodna bypass are feasible. I really want to celebrate that because that is an important issue. People in Ipswich can now look at this as a real opportunity for the transport corridor through our region to be able to carry the traffic that is coming. It was just not a possibility under what the state government were putting forward. They have harped on about it. All their apologists in the local area have continued to campaign for us to upgrade the existing road, which would merely inconvenience everyone for something like seven years while they did it, and then at the end of it the time line for its actual service life was something like five years. So seven years of total construction chaos gives you five years of momentary relief.

That is exactly the process we went through back in 1994 when the Labor Party last unveiled an upgrade of the Ipswich Motorway. It failed after six years. It was a total failure. The idea that they push us through a repeat of the process is really an insult to local people. Why is the Goodna bypass better than the upgrade? Apart from the fact that all three options for it now have the green light from the engineers and apart from the fact that there is no such thing as an afflux or undermining problem anywhere on that route, by proceeding in this fashion the Commonwealth will largely avoid all the consequences of disruption during construction. There will still be considerable disruption with the work on the interchange at Logan—and further down the road there will be that kind of disruption—but further disruption will be minimised because we will be using a greenfield site.

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