John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Well, yes and no. It must happen; it is a question of when. Personally I have no problem with private industry being involved in making it happen, but the point is that it will not happen—and neither will something probably just as important, and that is to have a freeway through the mountains opening up Sydney to western New South Wales. This is very, very important and I believe it should be rail as well as a freeway.

Linking western New South Wales via a western route for a Melbourne to Brisbane link is an incredibly important thing. We had allocated $20 million to do the engineering study for that route through the mountains. We put in $15 million to push ahead with the engineering placement for the western route for rail access from Melbourne to Brisbane. If you link those two things up in western New South Wales, you have immediately unclogged Sydney. I think one of Sydney’s biggest problems is access. To persevere with getting goods from Melbourne through to Brisbane and vice versa, even from Sydney to either of those two places, via the coastal route is a little akin to madness because you are going to keep throwing good money after bad. Without spending the kind of money that the American administration is currently spending on underwriting credit in the US—and around the world, in effect—you are never going to make it an open link from Sydney.

It would be far cheaper, far faster and far better to spend money where our previous government saw it needed to be spent—that is, in opening Sydney up to western New South Wales and making western New South Wales the much faster route for goods going from south-eastern Australia to the north; and also linking it up with the Indian-Pacific railway line going to Perth, and by virtue of that also linking it up with Adelaide and with Darwin. As trade increases—and it is generally the lighter and faster goods that are travelling out of Darwin to Indonesia, Malaysia et cetera—that will become more and more important. But this does need a strategy, and that is certainly lacking in New South Wales transport ministers. I recall the previous Deputy Premier of New South Wales, Mr Watkins, once saying, ‘Why would you want to spend money west of the Blue Mountains putting in a rail link from Melbourne to Brisbane?’ I guess it is that kind of short-sighted ignorance of strategic planning that has left Sydney in the mess it is in today.

It is well known, and many people involved in transport have proved this, that businesses with their warehouses located in Sydney could deliver goods much cheaper and much faster, for example, from the town of Parkes to south-eastern Australia—in fact they could deliver all the way from Brisbane to Adelaide within 24 hours. If they warehoused there, they could deliver anywhere from Brisbane all the way around to Adelaide within 24 hours and it would save them money compared to their situation in Sydney now. Sydney is such a bottleneck in terms of going north, south or west. If you put a freeway and a decent railway line through the Blue Mountains out to the central west, you would open up Sydney. I think the estimate is that 14 hours less is needed to go through the central west—through Parkes and Dubbo—from Melbourne to Brisbane or the other way to transport goods as against the 2½ to three days it takes currently to go along the coastal route through Sydney. That does not make very much sense. We do have to think long term.

I get very worried when I hear the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government talk about in effect subsidising the deficits owed by state governments, particularly New South Wales, and wanting to put all the money held in reserve for infrastructure—out of AusLink, be it 1, 2 or 3—into urban transport. Clearly that is nobody’s responsibility except the state government’s, who have obviously got themselves in a terrible pickle in New South Wales; but that is their fault and nobody else’s. They should let New South Wales concentrate on fixing that. The federal government and the new minister should take responsibility for fixing the strategic nature of transport infrastructure around Australia at the federal level. Previous transport ministers—be it Warren Truss, John Anderson or Mark Vaile—set up a system whereby we took over the major train routes. To simply forget them now that we have actually taken responsibility for them and start spending more and more money on what are very much state responsibilities is going to condemn the strategic movement of goods around Australia to continued confusion.

It is all very well to pick up urban transport, be it in Melbourne, Brisbane or Sydney, but to do that at the cost of the future of transport, be it transport to port or transport inland, is to do a very short-sighted thing. It is certainly looking after your old mates, as the minister would be if he starts pouring all that money into Sydney. I think that money was designated for the strategic movement of goods around Australia, as I just said—things like the inland rail from Melbourne to Brisbane through the central west of New South Wales and things like opening up a freeway, which will in effect in the medium and long term be of enormous benefit to Sydney. His only concern seems to be relieving the pressure on the New South Wales government.

In conclusion, I would like to say that we basically support the first part of this bill. It is certainly good to see that those parts which relate to indexation seem to have been removed from the second part of the bill. The issue really is that the money gathered by the Commonwealth government and by the state governments is spent on roads rather than trying to get them out of a hole that they may be in.

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