Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

‘You’ll be kidding,’ he said. Here we have, yet again, a return to the cyclical logic which will drive trucks forever along the Brisbane urban corridor. Here we have a repeat of the policy position they had at the last election, the election before that and the election before that—in fact, all the way back to 1990 and 1993—which consigned heavy B-double trucks past people’s letterboxes, through the electorate of Bonner, along the Mount Gravatt-Capalaba Road, and in Moreton through Kessels Road, through Riawena and through Granard Road. The member for Batman and the federal opposition do not understand that the widening of the Ipswich Road corridor is not the only solution for the Brisbane-Ipswich corridor. They have failed to understand that there will be a need for 20 lanes of traffic between Brisbane and Ipswich over the decades ahead. What are they going to do: widen out everything by hundreds of metres along a track that was discovered by Alan Cunningham in the 1840s? The route of the Ipswich Motorway is the road the horses tripped over as they were heading out towards Warwick. It has not changed. I can tell a story in the House about my great-great-grandfather. When he was a farmer at Moggill in the 1860s, he had to row across the river to court my great great-grandmother, who was the Congregational Church minister’s daughter, at Goodna. Nothing has changed.

While the Australian Labor Party want to revisit the agro and the cyclical nonsense of partisan attacks, the Howard government have now put $2.3 billion towards creating a link between the Warrego and Cunningham highways and the Logan Motorway. We are determined to expand our toll-free trial on the Logan Motorway and the Gateway Motorway. There are 221,000 fewer trucks thundering along Kessels Road at night because I have been able to secure the funding for that, and I need the Labor Party’s support in this place to urge the Labor Party in Queensland to get real and get fair and put the people of Queensland and their long-term infrastructure needs first. That is what this motion is about today. It is going to be very interesting to see how the Labor party respond to the challenge that I have outlined for them today.

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