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

It is interesting to look at some of the reasons why this legislation is before us. One that I find really interesting is that we are going to rename the primary legislation, because, apparently, it is important to rename it from the Nation Building Program (National Land Transport) Act 2009 to the National Land Transport Act. Given the current policy settings of the government, I think that this is a misnomer and that the government is in fact engaging in deceptive and misleading conduct by renaming the act as the National Land Road Transport Act.

Very clear statements have been made by the government that they have no intention of contemplating urban rail projects and that urban rail, for some reason or another, is not considered to fall within the ambit of the concept of land transport. That, of course, is an incredibly curious decision to have made. There is an enormous amount of commentary building around the nation about the decision to decide arbitrarily that one part of the land transport agenda is to be removed and isolated from consideration by the federal government. It really is quite an extraordinary decision to have made.

Things had evolved, and there has long been a campaign to get serious federal government engagement in rail, particularly in public transport delivery. In this day and age, one cannot sensibly talk about the land transport task, particularly in a metropolitan setting, without considering the role of public transport and the role of rail as part of the public transport product. It is a decision that has been taken by the federal government that defies all rationality. You cannot possibly be in a situation where you are engaging in strategic planning for a metropolitan area without considering public transport and rail.

There is an idea that we can continue to just expand our roads to provide a solution for congestion problems. As someone at a recent light rail convention said, 'Building more roads to deal with congestion is like loosening your belt to deal with obesity.' It is not actually going to work and it is not an intelligent way to address the problem. There was an interesting article this morning by Ross Gittens, a respected economist, which said:

For reasons that I don't understand, the present crop of Coalition governments—federal and state—seem biased against public transport as the answer to traffic congestion and have reverted to the 1960s notion that more tollways will fix everything.

They are certainly not going to fix everything. I think the figures are that about 80 per cent of Australians live in cities. That is not to in any way undervalue the people who do not live in cities or recognise their needs, but, if we do not accept that this is an issue that affects the vast majority of Australians, it is a great shortfall in the thinking of the government. As I said, it defies logic. You cannot possibly be planning to deal with congestion or developing a coherent model for dealing with the traffic problems within a metropolitan area without a deep engagement in public transport issues and the need to provide an expansion of the rail network as a very important part of that public transport response.

Clearly, that is where the state governments are needing an enhanced federal government contribution. The Prime Minister has said, 'We're sticking to our knitting; we don't know anything about that.' Over the last six years, the federal government has, through its Major Cities Unit, acquired a very considerable capacity to understand these things. The Major Cities Unit was set up to come to terms with these issues of planning land transport within a metropolitan setting. I acknowledge Dorte Ekelund, who was the principal of the Major Cities Unit and who, just this week, was part of a group that received a very prestigious award from Planning Institute Australia for the work that had been done by the Major Cities Unit.

The idea that there was not the capacity within the federal government to do this and that it is not within their palate or their suite of expertise is quite profoundly wrong. It takes us to the Prime Minister, who seems to have a fascination with the world of the past and sees anything like rail as something that is a bit left-wing. Public transport is obviously far too left-wing for him to want to engage in. Why we need federal government involvement here is the recognition that the whole basis of funding within the Commonwealth has changed over the last 100 years, in case the Prime Minister has not noticed.

During the great rail-building era that took place between the 1890s and the 1930s, which was when a lot of the backbone of urban rail around Australia was built, the states had income tax collection powers and they had very extensive excise powers. As a consequence of the Second World War the states surrendered to the Commonwealth some of their powers, such as collecting income tax, and as a result of some of the landmark High Court cases over the years, particularly during the 1990s, the states lost a great deal of their power to levy excise. The trajectory and the relativity of funding has very much moved from the states to the Commonwealth. Hence, it is not acceptable now, given that move of financial capacity from the states to the federal government, for the federal government to say, 'This is a critical area of infrastructure development that we are not going to take part in and we are going to say to the states, "You do that yourself."' The size and cost of these projects are really getting to a point where it is outside the capacity of the states to deliver these upgrades by themselves. We do need to get the federal government engaged in it.

We need to have a discussion. There needs to be some intellectual engagement by the Prime Minister rather than a reliance on 'we're sticking to our knitting' to describe why it is that they will not countenance an engagement with the funding of urban rail projects. We have the Prime Minister jumping up and down and rabbiting on about the carbon tax and the cost to householders, although we know that the vast majority of householders are fully compensated for any impact of the carbon tax. A much greater impost on people is the cost of transport. The cost of transport is very much related to the availability of public transport. Indeed, the average Western Australian is spending more than 15 per cent of their total household expenditure on transport. That is an enormous percentage of the overall income that is spent by a household on transport. That is $192 per week or 15 per cent of total household income.

The impact that traffic congestion and commute times are having on family life is becoming a very real issue in Western Australia. A recent survey of businesses by the Royal Automobile Club of WA showed that 84 per cent of respondents believe that traffic congestion is having a negative impact on their business. The majority of businesses related this as being 'negative to extremely negative'. The overwhelming majority of businesses said that their exposure to traffic congestion has increased.

About 100,000 new vehicles are added onto Perth roads each year. Examining some of the data that is coming out about traffic congestion and the impact of those vehicles, we see average commuter travel speeds have decreased by about 15 kilometres per hour over the last 10 years. The TomTom Traffic Index recently showed that in peak period a one-hour trip will now take an extra 31 minutes. The congestion level between the period of free flow to non-free flow right across the city is around 30 per cent. More people are having to travel longer periods of time in their cars or on public transport because of this congestion. We are not going to deal with this sensibly just by attempting to expand the road network. In places like the Kwinana Freeway and the Mitchell Freeway, we really have to appoint where the capacity for expansion, particularly in the five kilometres either side of the city, is not there. The roads are now up against a point where continued expansion is just not possible.

So we do need to have a land transport act. We should have a piece of legislation that genuinely is a land transport act. But what we have in reality is a road transport program that shows that the Prime Minister, his cabinet and his transport minister are very much fixed in the 1960s and 1970s and that they have simply been unable to adjust and adapt to the 21st century realities of our cities.

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