Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased that we are finally having a discussion about transport and congestion in Melbourne in this place. I will not be supporting the motion, but it is well overdue that we had a discussion about the issue.

If you look down the Eastern Freeway on any given morning during the working week you will see two things. The first thing you will see is cars backed up bumper to bumper, and you will see something very similar along Alexandra Parade or going down Hoddle Street. The second thing that you will see, Mr Deputy Speaker, is a great swathe of green land down the middle of the Eastern Freeway heading out. That land was reserved over 30 years ago for a rail line out to Doncaster. If you can get your hands on a copy of the 1980 Melway, you will find stops marked out along the route that was meant to be for a rail line out to Doncaster. That line has never been built. Successive state Labor and Liberal governments have promised it and never delivered on it. As a result, the people who live in the eastern suburbs either side of that Eastern Freeway have no real public transport option to get to work. And as a result, we see this congestion every morning in my electorate on Hoddle Street, on Alexandra Parade and on the Eastern Freeway.

If we are serious about fixing congestion in Melbourne, the first step should be to build that rail line out to Doncaster, and the second step should then be to supplement that by building the Melbourne Metro rail project. What common sense and reason tell us—but also as every study that has been conducted shows—is that most of those people who are coming in from the east don't want to go west; as good as the west is, that is not where they are wanting to go. They are wanting to come into the city—to go work, to study or for other reasons. And so what do they do? They come down Hoddle Street or Alexandra Parade, or they take the rat runs through other parts of our electorate. This idea of the East West Link, and that there is somehow a massive, unmet, east-west demand from the cars that are coming in is just a furphy. People are wanting to come into the city. All that the proposal for an east-west tollway—which was first floated by the state Labor government, and now it has got legs from the federal opposition—will do is increase congestion in the inner city of Melbourne. It will turn the electorate of Melbourne into a rat's nest of on and off ramps. It will do nothing to relieve congestion and allow people to spend more time with their families or more time at home.

One of the best ways that we could free up space on our roads for light commercial freight to get around is to get people out of the cars and into trains; into a train coming down the Eastern Freeway and then into a Metro train. But because of that lack of vision we now have the very real prospect that one of the things that makes Melbourne such a great place to live is about to be wrecked. I know that for many of the people sitting here in this chamber or elsewhere, the inner suburbs of Melbourne are just a place that you go through on your way somewhere else. But for us, it is where we live. People are sick of the congestion. They want to see effective public transport in Greater Melbourne, because they know that the alternative of building more roads is just building more traffic jams. We have seen that with every proposal that has come into Melbourne that has been supposed to solve some kind of congestion. Building more roads to cure congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity. All it will do is extend the traffic jams further and further.

The people of Melbourne and those public transport advocates have been fighting this proposal for years. We first heard it floated by the Labor Party in Victoria. Then when it faced such stiff opposition it adopted some kind of middle position in the lead-up to the last state election. Now we are seeing it coming up again. I congratulate the government for committing to Melbourne Metro rail. I think it is a very good initiative and one that has been pushed for for some time—it is $3 billion, and a very worthy investment. But what I am worried about is this: if the polls are right at the moment and we have a change of government come September, there is a very real risk that the Melbourne Metro rail project—which is the number one priority identified by Infrastructure Australia; the East West Link is not does not even make the list at all because there is not even a business case for it—will not be built. And so earlier today I introduced into the House of Representatives a bill that would Abbott-proof the inner-city suburbs of Melbourne and ensure that Melbourne Metro rail gets funded first—before we fund East West. And I hope that the government, having taken the first step to build Melbourne Metro rail, also gets behind the bill. I am very worried that we are yet to find out Labor's true position on the East West Link.

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