Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2009-2010. These bills seek appropriation authority from parliament for additional expenditure of money from the Consolidated Revenue Fund in order to meet requirements that have arisen since the budget. They add up to around $2 billion. The funds will be directed towards important nation-building programs that will create jobs and help deliver a low-carbon economy. These include additional funds for the Solar Homes and Communities Plan and other energy efficiency measures for householders. The 2009-10 budget firmly concentrates on nation building, and by investing in infrastructure such as roads, education and community infrastructure this budget has helped to create jobs and build more efficient infrastructure.

A particular nation-building project that has recently been completed in my electorate of Deakin is something that I am immensely proud of—that is, the grade separation of Springvale Road. Although there are still a few minor works to go, the major parts are done and the traffic jams are over. It was on 11 January this year that the new underground Nunawading railway station was officially reopened, with traffic resuming on Springvale Road a few days before. This included, for the first time, the complete removal of boom gates and the railway level crossing that had existed since 1882. In recent decades of course this crossing has been consistently congested. Traffic has been delayed. It has created a nightmare not only for drivers but for residents of Nunawading and anyone who has had any need to go across or through the suburb.

At the time of the 2007 election the Australian Labor Party made a commitment to the people of Deakin. We committed to do something about Springvale Road—not just to do something but a genuine commitment to allocate $80 million to the much needed project and to deliver this whilst working in cooperation with the Victorian state Labor government. Unlike the Liberal Party, who for 12 long years in government and many years prior promised to fix the problems at Springvale Road crossing in Nunawading and achieved nothing, this was a genuine commitment to get the job done and, as they say, the proof is now in the pudding. The job has been done and it was done in only two years. Even more than that, the actual construction was completed in approximately six months.

The type of construction and the way it was carried out in particular would be of great interest to many in this House because it has shown us a new way of performing grade separations in urban areas without shutting down railway services and road services for months on end. It has shown that, by working in an alliance configuration, all the jobs required to be done in a grade separation can actually be done concurrently or very nearby. For instance, it means that there are no overnight works for 12 or 18 months whilst rail tracks are lowered. It means that when it comes to noise issues there are lots of things that can be done differently so that local residents are not put out. That is what happened with Springvale Road.

This method was first trialled a few years ago on a project a couple of stations up the line at Middleborough Road. Although there were some problems with that, lessons were learnt along the way and the especially good thing is that they were applied to the Springvale Road project. That meant of course that the project ran very smoothly. It ran ahead of time, and that is a great thing. Many civil and construction projects do not run ahead of time. Sometimes they get caught up by delays that have nothing to do with how good the workers on the job may be but have to do with design or environmental issues. That was not the case with Springvale Road. What has been learnt from this project can be applied to the next job that is done in Melbourne or in another capital city—how things are done quicker, how they are done smarter and how they will save money for the governments of the future. That is a good thing.

A city like Melbourne has far too many level crossings. With more than four million people living in the city now, and with traffic volumes increasing every year, the number of level crossings has remained static for many years. While it used to be quite easy to get across parts of Melbourne, at certain times it is now becoming harder and harder because the city is growing bigger. Not only are there more cars on the road; more train services means that boom gates are down for far longer on all these level crossings.

The Springvale Road rail crossing in Nunawading was well known in Melbourne as the worst intersection in town and rated for at least two years by the RACV as Melbourne’s worst red spot—that is, the most congested. And the congestion was not just at peak times. This was a railway level crossing where you could have traffic jams on a Sunday afternoon—and this is on a six-lane road with three lanes each way. It was very common for traffic to bank up for half a kilometre or more. So there were many people—and it was not only local residents, because it is a main arterial road in the east of Melbourne—who regularly got caught on Springvale Road. The knock-on effect of something like that is not always considered. When a large road like that is blocked many people think: ‘Well, I don’t want to drive up there. It is too crowded. I’m going to drive somewhere else.’ So they start using local streets as rat runs or they go to minor roads which then get clogged. The problem affects much larger areas than the particular intersection or that particular suburb.

The problem had been going on for many, many years, as I was certainly aware. I have lived in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne all my life and as far back as I can remember, and for many years before that, there was lobbying for this project to be done—for the railway to be lowered and for the road to be put over the top. In fact, last year I visited a retirement village on Springvale Road just down from the railway crossing where I spoke to a lady of 92 who said to me that her father had been complaining about that railway crossing in 1945. I really did not know that the problem had been going on for so long. I am sure that there was not as much road traffic then and that there were not as many trains but it sounds as if it has always been a problem.

But it is a great thing that the Rudd Labor government delivered on its commitment of $80 million to complete this project. It is especially pleasing to report to the House that the Victorian Labor government delivered $60 million to build and coordinate the project and that both governments have worked extremely cooperatively together. That has been a great thing. There has not been blame or finger-pointing. There has been communication, which is quite new for this type of project in the urban environment. Many times in the past federal governments would not touch these sorts of projects. But they are needed. They are needed to make our community a better place, to make it more efficient and to employ people. Slowly but surely, as I said, our suburbs have become clogged with traffic.

There is a sense of achievement for local residents, road and rail users and pedestrians who tried to cross Springvale Road. That sense of achievement is immense, also, for local businesses around the crossing whose customers could not get to them because the boom gates were always down or because the traffic was always banked up. It is no longer a toss of the coin as to whether you are going to be 20 minutes late to where you wanted to get to. There are no boom gates. When you drive smoothly past the new underground Nunawading railway station without having to halt and wait for those boom gates to come down yet again and watch as one or more trains go past in succession, that is a very good experience. In fact, you may not even notice you have gone over the railway line, which I suppose is the best measure of success for the project in total—if people do not even know it is there.

The road that is there now, beautifully done, with a fantastically smooth surface, runs over the top of a railway line that carries 218 trains every day—there are not as many on weekends—and those trains are full of people. There were quite often accidents at the level crossing, and 50 serious accidents in five years. When those accidents happened, not only the road but also the railway line was blocked for many hours at a time. Every time that happened it affected literally thousands of people.

As with the construction project I mentioned before, a lot of things were done differently, and a lot of that was project scheduling. How do we do things on a job like that and not put others out? It meant that the road had to be closed, but only for a few days in total. So, even when road closures were notified, often within half the time notified for closure the road would again be open because the work had been completed so quickly. Instead of having the road closed while the dirt was being dug out from underneath to make the tunnel for the train lines, a concrete structure was poured into place and the dirt was dug out from underneath the concrete while the traffic drove over the top. That meant that the road was open for an extra two or three weeks; again, a very good thing for the local people.

More than 50,000 vehicles a day no longer have to run the risk of being stuck in a traffic jam or being caught up in yet another accident. It was only on 29 July last year that the first pile hole out of 400 for the project was bored, which is not very long ago. I was there on that day when it was just the earth waiting to be dug out. Four hundred piles were done in record time. The concrete was poured and it was a very well-run project. I had the great honour, with the Victorian Minister for Roads and Ports, Tim Pallas, and the state member for Mitcham, Tony Robinson, on New Year’s morning, of all days, this year to remove the last boom gate. Even though the road was closed at that time, it was opened not long after. Until that morning, in fact as we took away the last boom gate, the very last trains were still running across that level crossing.

As I said, working hand-in-hand with the state government gave the project a lot of advantages. It meant that, when it came to getting things done, there was not the usual logjam that you get on projects where one side blames the other. This project worked as a model for cooperation. The workers on site worked hours—I certainly cannot overstate this—which I know many of us, even though we work long hours, would probably blanch at. These were the people who did the overnight shifts and the weekends; these were the people who worked over the holidays and on public holidays when, quite frankly, most of the rest of us were at home relaxing and having a good time. It is that dedication and the professionalism of the work that I commend. Of course, the engineers and the project management staff also put in those hours. It was a great team effort all round and, certainly, it is a great pointer to things to come in that area.

I mentioned earlier taking away the boom gates with Tony Robinson. Tony Robinson, the state member for Mitcham, was a long-time advocate of getting this project done. Kirstie Marshall, in the adjoining state seat of Forest Hill, also did a lot of lobbying at the state level to get the project done. The project would not have happened without the great support of the Victorian Labor Premier, John Brumby, and the minister for roads, Tim Pallas. Both of them came many times to view works on the project. That showed the level of interest and also got the news out there that things were actually happening. As I said, the state government contributed $60 million to the project as part of the Victorian Transport Plan. They now have a long list of other, similar projects that they will get done over the coming years—that is, grade separations in urban areas.

I have not yet mentioned the wonderful new underground station in relation to the project. The old Nunawading station was an asbestos cement building that had been put up in the late 1950s. It was a very cold and uninviting place that was falling apart. The new station is underground. It is accessible by lift and stairs on both sides of Springvale Road. It is manned from the first train till the last. It has customer facilities. It even has a coffee shop. These are the sorts of things that are attractive to people and that make them feel like travelling by train. It is all very well to put the message out there that you must use public transport but it actually has to be a pleasant experience for people to want to come back. Using Nunawading station is a pleasant experience. It is an absolutely wonderful design and has been architecturally noted already, and I am sure it will be again.

With a project like this something else which is important is the impact on local employment. This project had about 200 full-time staff on the job, not only in the project management office but also working on the tools. The best thing about that was the money flowing into the local economy—from not only the workers who turned up each day and spent their money at the local shops and the local suppliers but also the local contractors who took out some of the smaller works packages on the job. One of the reasons the station was built so quickly is that it was not built on site; it was built off site. It was prefabricated at a factory in Deakin—at the other end of my electorate—and then brought down and lowered into place. That again saved a number of weeks if not months on the construction. Even more importantly, it kept local people in jobs last year when the global financial crisis was hitting the hardest.

The local businesses that are there now of course will also benefit greatly because Nunawading is now not split into two—you can easily get from one side to the other and if you can see it then you can now get there, whereas only a month and a half ago you might have been able to see it but you would have had to wait a long time to get there as you waited for various trains and/or car traffic to clear. The completion of this project has, of course, been very popular in my local area. But it does concern me that if the Liberals had had their way then the project would never have been funded. I should add that the member for La Trobe was very complimentary when on Monday this week in this place he said:

… in the seat of Deakin at the Springvale Road intersection the traffic congestion has been fixed—I am a big supporter of fixing the Springvale Road …

I congratulate him on that. Of course, it took a federal Labor government to do this, because for 12 long years nothing happened under the Liberals when it came to urban transport—when it came to actually doing it rather than talking, making hot air and making empty promises. Of even greater concern to anyone involved in this and other similar projects was the Liberal and National Party coalition’s attempt on 1 June last year to strip the funding from the national land transport component of the Nation Building Program. It was the Nationals with the support of the Liberals who put up an amendment in the House of Representatives to strip that funding from the program. It would have cut all federal funding from the Springvale Road rail separation project—and not only Springvale Road but also another 40 projects across Australia worth more than $655 million, including $30 million for the Clyde Road project that I know the member for La Trobe is attached to.

So after years of neglect, inaction and a complete failure to do anything about Springvale Road, when the project is fully funded by a Labor partnership between federal and state governments, the Liberals attempted to scuttle the project by withdrawing nearly 60 per cent of that funding. Fortunately, though, this con was exposed by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government in the House on 1 June last year. Fortunately for the people in my electorate of Deakin and the many people who use Springvale Road and its level crossing, these appalling amendments did not pass the House. The Hansard shows the names of those who tried and failed to take this vital funding away. The Rudd Labor government understands local issues and the impact of fixing local problems.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

I will pick up where I left off before the divisions in the chamber. I want to extend my congratulations to everyone involved in the grade separation of the Springvale Road project. Of course, work on Springvale Road is not the only thing that has been happening in my electorate as a result of budget decisions. There has been other fairly significant investment in the electorate, especially in my local schools. In the brief time I have left for this speech, I can only really say that the National School Pride Program projects which have gone to 40 schools in my electorate, involving funding of $6.125 million, have been warmly received by parents, teachers, principals and students. The funds have been put to such good use, especially in schools where they have ovals they have not been able to use for years on end because, as everyone in Melbourne knows, water is short and many ovals have died off. What this funding has allowed a lot of schools to do is to put in ovals with special drought resistant grasses that maintain a surface and allow the kids of the school to get out at recess, at lunchtime and after school and play and have a healthy education experience instead of being kept inside all the time because there are no outdoor play areas. I commend the bills to the House.

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