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

I am sorry; I do not want to interrupt. Because Western Australia had already built its part of the line to Kalgoorlie on narrow gauge we had a split; this was built as a standard gauge line. So we had this problem of the standard gauge and the narrow gauge.

As has been said earlier tonight, in the 1960s—and I acknowledge this was under the Liberal Menzies government—there was an agreement to provide funding for that narrow-gauge part of the line, that is from Kalgoorlie to Fremantle and Kwinana, to be made into a standard-gauge line. I do not think the Liberal government can be too boastful about its track record on this because, while they certainly agreed to that, the Menzies government had been part of the problem for Western Australia. They had been part of the problem since the end of the Second World War by not accepting the need to lift the iron ore export ban, which had been imposed before the Second World War because of problems that existed with Japan. I would add that it would be fair to say that state Labor governments had some policies that were well-intentioned but not necessarily conducive to opening up our iron ore exports. These were policies that related to the need to build manufacturing capacity in Western Australia—totally understandable, as we in Western Australia had very little manufacturing industry and were suffering under the yoke of the very heavy tariffs that were in place to protect the manufacturing industry of the eastern states.

It is important that we understand this because this goes back to some of the problems that we are still trying to deal with today. In another part of WA, on coming into the Federation—

Honourable members interjecting—

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