Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

The essential section upgrades, while they are well overdue, will come as a huge relief for the long-suffering motorists on the Ipswich Motorway. But this only gets half the job done. We need the section into Ipswich between Gailes and Dinmore upgraded to complete the job and finally provide a solution to the chaos, accidents and bottlenecks along the Ipswich Motorway.

By doing this, the full upgrade will have cost about $1.7 billion in total. If we compare this to the federal government’s option of the Goodna bypass, at an initial estimate of $2.3 billion, plus the $600 million already allocated between Gailes and Darra, it will take the cost to nearly $3 billion. This is a massive cost that is not supported by the community or the state government and has no consensus or evidence as a solution.

The federal government has gone to a great deal of trouble over the past 10 years to ensure that the Ipswich Motorway would not be fully funded or upgraded. The government has run interference at every possible opportunity to prevent the upgrade of the motorway, and it has ignored the core problem. Surely the federal government should be more interested in getting an agreed solution that provides a long-term fix and is better value for taxpayer dollars.

There clearly seems to be some other agenda at play by the federal government. To put this into context, let us examine the government’s own report which it used to validate its decision to build a bypass road instead of a full upgrade of the Ipswich Motorway. The Maunsell report cost taxpayers $10 million, the terms of reference were dictated by the federal government and it specifically provided that the only possible outcome was one option: the bypass. To make matters even worse, the report cannot make any comparisons between a fully upgraded Ipswich Motorway and the bypass. In this way, the government could always be safe by referring to the report without any fear of unwanted comparisons or other information. This is convenient but very deceptive and a waste of taxpayer dollars to the tune of $10 million. For that sort of money you could get a report to say whatever you wanted and have whatever outcome you desired.

The fact is that the federal government has lost credibility on this road issue. It should allow a full and accountable funding process in cooperation with the community and the state, which will be responsible for construction of the motorway. The funding is not Liberal Party funding but taxpayer dollars, and it should be spent in consultation with the community and the state government. The member for Moreton has got one thing right, though, in his motion today. He has acknowledged that south-east Queensland is the fastest growing region in Australia. But he has done nothing about it for the past 10 years. He has always been vocal on state road issues but suspiciously silent on federal road funding matters. After 10 years of road funding starvation on the Ipswich Motorway, the feds finally dump a bucket of money—but in the wrong place. This is typical of the federal government operating blindly from Canberra.

The Goodna bypass represents a very expensive and flawed option that does not have the support of the community or the state government. But let me assure the federal government and, more precisely, the members for Blair, Ryan and Moreton: the community is very angry with them and with their bypass road, and they will make their views heard all the way to the next federal election.

See this speech in context