Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

There is another point I need to touch upon. I did not hear everything that the member for Paterson said. I think he was reflecting on a review that was done on this project post the 2007 election. Let me tell you another story. I started on the Hunter Expressway path in Easter of 1988, when I was a young, handsome counsellor on Cessnock City Council. On the eve of Easter 1988, the next section of the F3 Freeway, now called the M1 Pacific Motorway, opened to a place called Freemans Waterhole, just short of Newcastle. What was the result? Suddenly we had traffic from both the Pacific Highway and the New England Highway spilling onto the roads through to the Cessnock local government area. This was a disaster and the council needed to respond. That was when I started advocating for what we then called the Kurri Kurri Corridor, which has become the Hunter Expressway. So it has been a long time for me.

Finally, we started to get the Kurri Kurri Corridor route option in place and the design of the road progressing, but then, as I said, nothing happened for 11½ years. When we were elected in 2007, we had an ageing response to a very serious problem. We also had, as I acknowledged, on the back of what the member for Paterson had to say, a reluctant New South Wales government. We had to persuade the New South Wales government that this was a project worth contributing to. So we had to review the project. As I said, 11½ years had elapsed. The question was: was it still the right corridor? Was it still the best response? Was it still economically viable—in other words, did it give people the required return? So we did the very responsible thing: we had an independent consultant review the project. At the time I said yes, it was the right thing to be doing. If we were going to spend $1.7 billion of taxpayers' money, we needed to make sure we spent it in a way which gave us the best result. And guess what? No-one was more pleased than I.

I was a very nervous local member at the time because I was concerned that so much time had elapsed that the independent consultants might have said that this was not the right response. But thankfully, they confirmed the advocacy, the efficiency and the economic return. They confirmed that this was the right project to address the Hunter's problems, and the rest is history.

Some time after that, the then Prime Minister and I, and I think Mr Albanese, flew to the Hunter and announced that we would fund the construction of the Hunter Expressway. Again, I thank the coalition government for their $50 million in those 11½years. I thank them for acknowledging Labor's primary role in all this work. I, too, am disappointed that the New South Wales government was so reluctant to come to the table, but it was a Labor federal government that dragged them to the table in the end. I am also happy to acknowledge that the global financial crisis perversely helped us in this process because the government of the day was looking for money to create jobs in the economy and this project created a lot of jobs—hundreds of jobs—with many flow-on benefits to local contractors et cetera. I remind the House that the member for Paterson opposed the stimulus package.

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