Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, I will not, but I certainly will reciprocate the favour. This is not something that I have invented. The government have said time and time again that they are not interested and they are not prepared to develop an urban policy, because that is something that they leave to the state governments. I do not quite understand how we are going to have all of this holistic and strategic thinking that we have been talking about if we are going to put our blinkers on and not talk about urban policy.

The member for Wills was previously talking about the Doncaster rail project. That is an absolutely magnificent project. It is a real tragedy that it is not one of the highest priorities for Victoria. I have had the pleasure of being invited by the Public Transport Users Association in Melbourne and working with Jackie Fristacky and others in the city of Yarra, using classic examples from Western Australia as to how you can deliver a railway line down the centre of a freeway, achieve great productivity for your community and get tremendous results. It is a very good way of ensuring that you can deliver a modern public transport network in built-up areas. This is precisely what we need in Perth. We need further investment in rail. We particularly need a rail link to the airport. We have one of the highest rates of movements in and out of our airport because of our fly-in fly-out activity. Unless we have further investment in public transport, we are simply not going to be able to keep that great productivity growth that is happening in Perth.

I want to use this opportunity to raise a major infrastructure project that has been sabotaged by the state government in Western Australia. It would have been funded by Infrastructure Australia had it not been for the sheer wickedness of Premier Colin Barnett. That project is the Pilbara integrated power solution. We have a situation in the Pilbara where we are struggling to provide the power infrastructure to fuel our industry. Even the most conservative entities such as the Department of Planning talk about how the Pilbara economy cannot expand without additional power generation being installed. We have Regional Development Australia saying that an immediate additional source of at least 100 megawatts is needed to meet short-term demand. Medium-term demand must be in the order of 350 megawatts with at least a million dollars worth of investment. The Chamber of Minerals and Energy is telling us that we need $4 billion worth of investment. But what we have continued to allow in the Pilbara is a group of independent warlords setting up their own little power stations, with no linkage of the network. As a result we have high-cost and substandard provision of infrastructure that is simply not going to cope with the future.

We had a report by SKM just last year that tells us that if we made that investment—if we were prepared to put in what in 2008 would have been $1.1 billion—we would actually get a saving over the next 20 years of $3.8 billion by building that integrated grid. So great are the power savings that we would get by putting all of those different power stations on the grid and allowing large-scale renewables to hang off them that the total benefit would be $3.8 billion, plus we would have a system of immensely greater resilience, much more resistant to the problems that are created by cyclonic behaviour and increasing cyclonic activity in that area.

But unfortunately the No. 1 submission to Infrastructure Australia in mid-2008 was withdrawn. The first thing the Premier did when he became Premier in 2008 was to withdraw that project because he wanted Oakajee—which of course has gone absolutely nowhere. He wanted to withdraw this. He wanted to manipulate the federal government into a position where they had to fund Oakajee. It is an absolute disgrace, and we have seen it. I want to work over the next three years to make sure that this project— (Time expired)

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