Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The honourable member is not going to name the product but will suggest to people that Pepsi Max is okay; there is no sugar. The other experience that I had—and the member for Fisher, were he in the chamber, would remember this—was the kerfuffle, I will call it, that we had in the early 1990s in the area that we share about the storage of spent radioactive waste material. There was quite a large community opposition to that. As it turned out, the argument was ultimately won and the storage facility was build elsewhere. But those same people were not at all aware of active radioactive sources bouncing around in the back of council utes through their community every day. Yes, if it is spent, we cannot store it. If it is live, well, we really do not care. It was an interesting insight into people’s view of dangerous goods.

It is important, particularly to me as the member for Longman, that the safe transport of dangerous goods is something that is well regulated and well policed. Running through the entirety of my electorate are the Bruce Highway—the main road corridor north from Brisbane to the major regional centres—and the north coast rail line. These transport corridors carry all of the freight from Brisbane port heading north and a number of things heading south.

My eastern boundary is the port of Brisbane, and we all saw what happened recently there with the oil spill, for which it looks likely that the Swire company may well be about to pay adequate compensation, but our council is a million dollars out of pocket because of that. So I understand that safety is necessary and I understand that safety in the carriage of dangerous goods is important for my constituents, the people I am here to represent and to look out for their interest.

A report in the Australian Journal of Emergency Management identified a number of the types of goods that travel up and down the highway, including petrol, liquefied petroleum gas, liquefied ammonia, molten sulphur, liquefied chlorine, concentrated hydrochloric acid, compressed hydrogen, sodium cyanide and liquid fuels coming south from Gladstone. So there are a number of very volatile materials running past major population centres in my electorate, including North Lakes and Caboolture. Over the years there have been a number of incidents. Most of them have, fortunately, been relatively minor. But in September 1992, for example, a minor incident that had the potential to be much more than that occurred near Nambour. Fortunately, nobody was injured as a result of the collision between an LPG tanker and an ethanol tanker, neither of which ruptured, but had either or both of them done so then we could have had a really serious incident on the highway. So we need to be very clear about how important it is that the transport of dangerous goods is, as I said, well regulated and well policed.

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