Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2008 and to outline the many transport challenges in my electorate of Swan. It is great to hear from the member for Capricornia that the Rudd government is meeting their commitments in her electorate, and I will go onto that further in my speech. As members of the House will know, this bill has three components. Each of these components is important and carries my full support.

The bill’s first purpose is to extend the Roads to Recovery program from 1 July 2009 to 30 June 2014. The Roads to Recovery program is an enormously successful and popular program. It was great to hear the member for Braddon last week recognise the success of this Howard-initiated program. He said that it was the bee’s knees. He went on to say it was all about safety and we should not bring politics into it but later in his speech pilloried the Howard government for allocating $15 million in 2004 in his electorate as purely an election stunt. So it is okay for the member for Braddon to first criticise the members of this side of the House for speaking about the inadequacies of the Rudd government and then turn around and do exactly that as to the previous government. I like the way he thinks! He certainly put a smile on my face. The member for Dunkley spoke on the same day about tolls and the inconsistencies of the Victorian state Labor government on this issue. It is fantastic that in the great state of Western Australia road tolls are an issue we do not have to deal with.

The Roads to Recovery scheme was established by the Howard government in November 2000 with the aim of providing a new support program for local roads of $1.2 billion over five years. In January 2004, the coalition government announced a further $1.2 billion over the four years from July 2005 to June 2009. At this point, it became a component of AusLink. AusLink was first established by the former coalition government in 2004 and represents the most significant change since Federation in the way the Commonwealth tackles the national transport task. The national land transport AusLink network is a single integrated network of land transport linkages of strategic national importance which is funded by federal, state and territory governments. The AusLink network is based on national and interregional transport corridors, including connections through urban areas, links to ports and airports, rail, road and internodal connections that together are of critical importance to national and regional economic growth, development and connectivity. Therefore, when the Roads to Recovery fund became part of AusLink it became part of the long-term Howard government transport infrastructure plan for Australia. In the 2005-06 budget, the fund was supplemented with a bonus of $307.5 million to provide an extra boost for councils that year.

This coalition policy has made an enormous contribution to the local community in my electorate of Swan. The Roads to Recovery life-of-program allocation for 2005-06 to 2008-09 for the councils in my electorate has been as follows: the City of Belmont received $921,000; the City of Canning, $2,175,000; the City of Perth, $729,000; and the Town of Victoria Park, $157,000. It was obviously a popular policy with the local councils. Up to 2005, 19 projects were nominated by the City of Belmont; 19 by the City of Canning; 12 by the City of South Perth; and 16 by the Town of Victoria Park. The beauty of this policy is that it decentralises power. It allows local governments to nominate projects they see as necessary and spend the money appropriately. This has never been as important as now, given the ever-centralising tendencies of the federal government. I will take this opportunity to commend the local councils who do an excellent job in implementing this program. With local government responsible for 80 per cent of all roads nationally, this was and will continue to be a vital policy for the health of Australia’s transport system.

The second purpose of this bill is to allow certain funds allocated under Roads to Recovery to be preserved in particular states or territories while arrangements can be made to determine the most appropriate entities to receive the funds. This provision is less important to my electorate on account of the local government entities that administer the scheme. However, I appreciate that in Western Australia seven per cent of Roads to Recovery funds are provided for special projects, being divided up between bridge works and access roads to Indigenous communities. In such cases it has been necessary to preserve these funds while a suitable authority is found to receive and manage their expenditure. The amendments in this bill provide legislative clarity to this longstanding practice.

The third major component of this policy is the provision to amend the definition to put beyond doubt that future funding under AusLink may be applied to rest stops, parking bays and decoupling facilities. This is a necessary amendment and I am happy to support it.

While other components of this bill are clearly admirable, it is important for all members to accept that this is purely a continuation of coalition government policy. It has become increasingly clear that the Rudd government has continued with the me-tooism of the campaign, and I will reflect on that with particular reference to my electorate of Swan. For a government that has continually criticised the Howard government and its achievements in government, it is great to see that it can at least recognise and applaud the Roads to Recovery program by continuing this program.

I would now like to refer to some specific issues that demonstrate the challenges facing my electorate. First I would like to talk about the Great Eastern Highway, which runs through my electorate of Swan. The Great Eastern Highway is a major road linking Perth with Kalgoorlie. It is also the gateway to Perth and is the first experience of many interstate and international visitors to Perth and Western Australia, besides the ashtray exits of our airports. It should be the golden pathway to our beautiful city and state but it has been sadly neglected by the state Labor government for the last eight years. It is the key route for vehicles accessing the wheat belt and the eastern goldfields. It also forms the western-most 595 kilometres of the main road transportation link between Perth and the east coast of Australia.

The road is mostly a federally funded national highway due to its national strategic importance. It is signed as National Highway 94, except for a nine-kilometre stretch between the Great Eastern Highway bypass and the Roe Highway and the 40-kilometre section between Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. It is also signed as Highway 1 between The Causeway and Morrison Road and as State Route 51 between Johnson Street, Guildford, and the Roe Highway.

I have here a press release from the Labor Party dated 29 October 2007. It states:

A Rudd Labor government will put $180 million into the Great Eastern Highway upgrade from Kooyong Road to the Tonkin Highway, a project that will cost $225 million, with the Western Australian government funding the balance.

I will seek leave to table that at the end of my speech. The promise of funding during the election came four days after the Howard government offered a similar package. This road has needed a section upgrade between Kooyong Road and the Tonkin Highway since 2000. It has always been considered a state road but the lack of care and concern by the Gallop and Carpenter governments means that they have ignored previous offers of funding to fix this road and have put at risk the people who use it daily.

The need for the Great Eastern Highway to be updated is highlighted by the figures in the document I hold here on the aircraft and passenger movement increases. This document says that the total aircraft movements in 2003-04 were 78,000 and in 2007-08 were 107,000. The passenger numbers have risen from six million in 2003-04 to over nine million in 2007-08. The road has not seen a cent of the promised money yet. It was obviously a promise made so that the sitting member at the time, Kim Wilkie, would be re-elected. It did not work. Instead, the Rudd government has pursued its favourite policy: delaying tough decisions by commissioning reports and organising committees. The people of my electorate have clearly been let down. I pledged on my first day in parliament to make sure the Rudd government delivered on its promises to the people of Swan. And on this I will continue until the money is forthcoming and the people in Swan benefit from the easing of congestion and a safer road.

Secondly, I would like to highlight the key need for an integrated transport solution network in my electorate. An integrated transport solution involves taking a holistic approach to transport operations in Swan. Kewdale rail freight terminal is a WA transport hub which receives goods from all over Australia by road and rail. Most people like to see their freight transported by the rail network as it takes heavy vehicles off the road. Kewdale is in the seat of Swan and is considered to be the key transport area of WA as there are so many companies and jobs in the area. Transport to the north-west and south-west and into the eastern states all leave from this area. It is an important part of the Western Australian economy and many of my constituents are employed in this industry. However, it becomes increasingly difficult for rail freight companies to profitably operate when they are constantly impeded by bureaucracy.

It is unbelievable that an operator of an interstate train may have to deal with seven safety regulators, three transport accident investigators, 15 pieces of legislation covering occupational health and safety of rail operations and 75 pieces of legislation over environmental management. Even negotiating the road freight bureaucracy can be problematic, with varying state based interpretations of the national heavy vehicle reforms on fatigue management, incomplete rollouts of state approved road networks that can carry the highly efficient B-triple vehicle combinations and the different treatment by states of widths and heights of loads. An integrated transport solution should therefore be negotiated cooperatively at COAG level.

An additional aspect of the integrated transport solution is safe and accessible public transport to free up congested roads and provide an affordable transport option for thousands of local people. I was pleased to see the WA Liberal Party commit to free public transport for the elderly in Western Australia during the recent election campaign. It will make a great deal of difference to the many pensioners in Western Australia. However, as I have communicated to my state colleagues, pensioners across my electorate are currently scared to use public transport on account a of recent crime spree near public transport nodes. I recently spoke in parliament about the disabled woman who was badly beaten at a bus stop near Curtin University in Bentley in my electorate. I also spoke about the Thornlie train line that runs through the heart of my electorate. It is well known in the local area for being the ‘crime line’ after a certain time at night. This message was reinforced on Sunday at a community barbecue in Como organised by local resident Janet Reid, where a recent crime near Canning Bridge station was discussed. We must address this situation, which the Carpenter government allowed to get out of control, and make public transport a truly viable alternative for the people of Western Australia.

I would like to finally concentrate on what can be done in the future to address these issues. I have recently spoken with a senior member of the incoming WA state government about the transport and infrastructure challenges facing my electorate, and the future seems bright. The person in question pointed out that there are vast sums of federal money that the Howard government allocated for projects that are yet to be utilised. Ending this tremendous neglect seems immediately possible. There are also many potential land transport projects that I look forward to working with the new state government on to ensure appropriate funding is available. The proposed new entrance to Perth airport in my electorate could be one of these.

I am sure that with the new Liberal-National government in WA we can look forward to a significant improvement in the transport infrastructure of Western Australia. We will have a government that will practise long-term planning as opposed to the short-term panic policies of the outgoing state Labor government. It will be a government that will produce a feasible state infrastructure strategy. It will be a government that will help foster an integrated transport system for the state and for country areas.

In summation, Australia is facing a growing transport task, with the amount of freight on Australia’s road and rail systems estimated to nearly double by 2020. The demand in our capital cities continues to grow. Perth’s population is expected to double in the next 50 years, and it will need to provide a strong and integrated transport network if it is to cope. The ineptness of the Carpenter government in meeting their basic responsibilities to local people on transport infrastructure is well known and has only made the problem worse. The challenge is limiting our carbon emissions and adding impetus to the need to develop an efficient and effective transport sector.

The Howard government’s record was commendable. The coalition created AusLink in 2004. Under the first AusLink program from 2004-05 to 2008-09, the Howard government provided $15.8 billion in land transport infrastructure funding. For the second AusLink program, the coalition pledged another $16.8 billion over five years for national road and rail projects, totalling around $32 billion, to improve Australia’s road and rail infrastructure. The coalition will press the states to harmonise their laws so that all Australians in the transport sector will be subject to the same regulatory treatment. We support a single national system of recognition for heavy vehicles. The coalition’s policies to build on its achievements in creating a national rail network via the Australian Rail Track Corporation are welcome. Total infrastructure spending in Australia in constant 2007 dollars rose from $21 billion in 1996 to $56 billion in 2007. The Labor Party’s continuation of these policies in this legislation is a testament to the Howard government legacy and I hope they will continue to support them. However, I urge the government to pursue an integrated transport policy and to meet the election policy commitments they made to the people of Swan. I commend the bill to the House. I seek leave to table the document that I referred to.

Leave granted.

See this speech in context