Philip Ruddock (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Nation Building Program (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2009 is not about substance; it is about the change of a name of a program which was in place. It does not provide extra funding. In that context it is appropriate that members of this House direct themselves to the title of the bill. The title of the bill is about nation building. I wish to speak about nation building because it is about providing infrastructure that will help to make Australia more internationally competitive and that will address major choke points in relation to the way in which goods can be moved and the extent to which people can be moved.

I have been very interested to note that speaking on this bill have been members such as the member for Paterson and, more recently, the member for Dobell, because I intend to speak about a major matter that impacts upon both of their electorates—the member for Paterson acknowledged it; the member for Dobell ignored it. The reality is that if you are about nation building you are about connecting our major cities: Melbourne to Sydney, Melbourne to Brisbane and Brisbane to Sydney.

If you look at the infrastructure that moves goods and enables people to move between those great cities of Melbourne and Brisbane, passing through Sydney, there is a variety of choices that you can make. As you come up the Hume Highway, you can use the Western Orbital, you can use the Cumberland Highway, you can use Villawood Road or perhaps you could even go on Silverwater Road through the member for Reid’s electorate. There are four major highways that all converge at one point in Sydney—that is, on Pennant Hills Road, which links the M2 and the F3 highways. It is a choke point that mixes passenger travellers from the Central Coast, those travelling between Sydney and Brisbane and within the electorate of Berowra, with large trucks carrying goods between our great cities. It is extraordinarily dangerous and will occasion a major accident at some point in time, to which people will say, ‘Why wasn’t something done about this?’

It is not as if it is not an issue that has not been thought about. The choke point is recognised. You will not get the commercial traffic off Pennant Hill Road or the F3 through infrastructure spending on an additional freight rail line. I would like to think it would, but the only way you will get trucks carrying containers onto trains is when they can drive their trucks on and off. Nobody likes the double and triple handling when they leave one destination and arrive at another. And I have not counted the number of bridges that would have to be raised on that rail link to be able to get it to operate effectively. There is no way that the freight traffic is going to be taken off those highways by rail infrastructure without an extraordinarily large investment in rail. If people were prepared to make it, I would encourage it. But even within my electorate you are dealing with something like more than a dozen major bridges that would have to be raised in order to be able to move freight effectively.

As I have said, this is not a new issue. When the Labor government in New South Wales wanted support for the building of the Western Sydney Orbital, the M7, Minister Scully, who was the minister for transport in New South Wales, was anxious to have a development that was going to impact on reducing traffic in his electorate. He was keen to see a highway built relatively cheaply on flat lands across the western suburbs of Sydney, but nobody thought about where the traffic was going to be dumped in the end. And of course what it was dumped on was the M2 freeway, a toll road that runs from the north-western suburbs of Sydney to the City of Sydney, and the only point at which that traffic can then progress northwards is on Pennant Hills Road.

A study was undertaken at that time because it was recognised that this was an issue that was going to have to be dealt with. You were not going to be able to build cheaply a western orbital through the hills of Berowra with another Hawkesbury crossing, so they looked at what other solutions might be able to be undertaken. A study was launched at that time because it was believed that you could not progress with a road development like the Western Sydney Orbital without having a plan as to how you were going to deal with the end of that road. In January 2001 a decision was announced in relation to the funding of the Western Sydney Orbital, but it also recognised that high priority had to be given to establishing a new link from the M2 to the F3 to relieve pressure on Pennant Hills Road and to complete the national highway ring-road around Sydney. Here we have a national highway in which there is no effective link. If you were really about building national infrastructure you would seriously want to do something about it.

There was a study undertaken to identify various scenarios for dealing with that issue. SKM was contracted by the Roads and Traffic Authority of New South Wales to undertake that work. After very extensive consultation, it was announced by the former government that there would need to be a solution. The preferred solution was a tunnel to link the M2 and the F3. Minister Anderson, in 2002, made an announcement that there would be no breaks in it, that it would have effective filtration and would recognise that the Pennant Hills Road ought not be degraded, if such a development were to proceed. There was considerable discussion about that. In my electorate, many people, concerned about the possibility of a tunnel, having seen what happened with the Lane Cove Tunnel and the Cross City Tunnel, looked at other alternatives. The former government set up a review under a very distinguished former chief judge of the Land and Environment Court to enable further consultation. Very extensive meetings took place in relation to that process. Importantly, the review confirmed that the tunnel option was the most appropriate to address the immediate needs but also it recognised that at some future point there needed to be a reservation of land for a genuine western orbital which could be constructed at a later time. These very important announcements were made at that time.

A further and most significant announcement was a decision of the former government, under the AusLink program, to recognise that this issue needed to be addressed and to provide funding for that link. I believe the amount committed in the forward estimates was of the order of $2 billion. And here we are discussing a program of nation building. We know there is a significant choke point, we know the issue needs to be addressed, we know that the Labor Party think, in ordering its priorities, that it is not projects of national interest that should be involved but, rather, projects in electorates which they hold or hope to hold. The north-western suburbs of Sydney have been ignored by the state Labor government over a long period and it appears those areas are being singularly ignored now. As the member for Dobell leaves, let me say to him that the major impediment to his electorate and the access of his constituents to Sydney is in fact the choke point I have identified.

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