Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to speak again without closing the debate.

Leave granted.

As the Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services, I take great pleasure in this report, The great freight task: is Australia’s transport network up to the challenge? It has involved over two years work for the committee and, as the member for Oxley said, we put a big effort into it. We took 194 submissions, held 30 public hearings, did countless inspections and visited a lot of ports. We visited Mackay, Gladstone, Brisbane and Newcastle. We took evidence from Sydney and visited Wollongong and Port Kembla. We visited Melbourne twice. We visited Portland, Darwin and Geraldton. We did not actually visit Perth but we took evidence from Perth, Albany, Bunbury and Esperance. So it was very comprehensive. We also took evidence from ports in Tasmania and from Adelaide and so on.

So I think we can say with a fair degree of justification that this is a very thorough report. On page 342 there is a very interesting matrix that gives a profile of each of the ports—what their capacities are, what their failures are. It gives throughput, current and projected; depth, current and proposed; and the key infrastructure projects, road and rail, that need to be put in place to make each port work.

I suppose the main conclusion we came to was that all our ports have a need for funding. We felt that the magic figure—this figure just kept recurring—was about $70 million. Some would be a lot cheaper and others would be a lot dearer. For example, at the Port of Brisbane there is six kilometres of work to be done, and that will cost about $150 million. But, if you look across all the major ports of Australia—not the minor ones—you would have to say an average of about $70 million is required. Where that money comes from is an interesting question. We suggest that a new fund over and above AusLink be put in place. The idea of that would be to look at critical infrastructure projects. We feel that we should spend about $600 million a year on that for five years, and that would, if you like, be the catch-up.

As we went around Australia, we saw some things that are crying out to be done. For example, the connectivity of Mount Gambier and Penola to Portland seemed to us to be one of the seminal things that have been waiting to be done for some time. And the Maldon to Dombarton section of rail should be put in place behind Wollongong and Port Kembla, which would allow coal to be taken from the Hunter Valley to that port—and Port Kembla is an underutilised port. That would allow coal to be taken down in reasonably large quantities without going through the Sydney suburban traffic system. Also, the Port of Brisbane, which is expanding rapidly, has a road connection problem.

The one that stands out that we really have to look at is Melbourne. That might sound strange from me, coming from Queensland, but Melbourne is the hub, the biggest port and has the most containers. Melbourne radiates out to Adelaide and through Adelaide up to Darwin, over to Perth and up to Sydney and Brisbane. It is the pivotal port, and if you do not get that one right then you have to rethink the whole logistics of freight in this country. We felt that channel deepening there was absolutely essential. If Melbourne is going to take Panamax- and Cape-size vessels and even larger ones, then the channels have to be deepened. I know it is an environmental problem and I know it will cause some heartburn, but Melbourne has amazing facilities. Its wharfage is excellent and it can take cars, containers and bulk. It can do just about anything, but it has a lot of impediments—for example, it needs the channel deepening that I mentioned; Footscray Road needs grade separation for road and rail; there is the Westgate Bridge, but during peak hours an alternative river crossing is needed; the Monash Freeway that links the south-eastern metropolitan region to the port precincts is experiencing chronic congestion; high-productivity vehicles need to be able to use Dock Link Road to access the North Dynon Rail Terminal; and there needs to be a rail link to the Lascelles Terminal.

If you get Melbourne right, then you have the ability to do other things, like have the new inland north-south rail line from Melbourne to Brisbane, or from Melbourne to Toowoomba initially. The Queensland government has already approved the Gladstone to Toowoomba section of that line, and that will be largely self-sufficient as it will take between nine and 12 new coalmines on stream. There is a leap of faith involved in going from Melbourne to Brisbane or Melbourne to Toowoomba. The combination of those two lines would totally revolutionise inland traffic, taking it through the most productive parts of Australia. If it were done to a point where it could be double-stacked, then that would be amazing and it would put Australia on an international footing in rail. We can do it and we did it from Rockhampton to Brisbane. The Queensland government has done tilt rail. Trains can do 160 kilometres an hour, even on narrow-gauge line. So this can be done. Vince O’Rourke, the former head of QR—who, in my opinion, is the best railman in this country—says: ‘Why don’t we do one train line and do it well? Show ourselves and the world what we are capable of and, quite apart from that, create one major fantastic artery.’ As he said, we have been patching up for years, and it shows.

We had a look at the branch lines too. Mr Deputy Speaker Quick, as a Tasmanian, you would know what a tragedy it is, because you lost yours ahead of most other places. They are crumbling. We heard from a Mr Zsombor from Canada, who worked in Alberta and developed a model where branch lines could be sold to interest groups. It might be the shire council, a grain growers organisation, a local community group or even a group of farmers, and they would sell the line to them for its disposal value—its junking value, I suppose: what you would get for it if it were to close. They would sell it to them for that and give them some strategic seed funding. In Canada, they also have a pool of wagons—and we could look at how the Australian government could assist with that sort of thing. It is possible, by having local ownership, to retain those lines.

The other thing that stood out in this inquiry was that this nonsense at borders has to stop. Now that we are tackling the business of the Murray-Darling and trying to look beyond state borders as to how these systems work, we have to take that same approach to the border crossing of road and rail. This business of Queensland waiting for New South Wales and New South Wales waiting for Queensland and both of them waiting for the Commonwealth and then having little spats while the Tugan bypass languishes for four years has to stop. We say that that could be achieved by the judicious use of what we call interstate commissions. Each border would have a commission made up of engineers, local authorities and government representatives—not necessarily members of parliament but key people in the bureaucracy—and these cross-border events would be funded 50:25:25. I think it is something worth doing.

This was a great inquiry. I compliment my deputy, Steve Gibbons, and the other members of my committee, as well as the secretariat led by Janet Holmes and Tas Luttrell, and especially the researchers, who put in such a big effort. We predicted nine years ago that this was going to happen again, so we just hope that this time the government takes a more positive approach to this report.

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