Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I would like to raise the issue of one of the very simplistic slogans involving the failed ideology of the Moorebank Intermodal: it is taking freight off road and putting it on rail. This at first sounds like a wonderful idea, because steel on steel is much more efficient than rubber on bitumen. In fact, you use about 50 per cent of the diesel fuel to transport a container via rail than you do via road. Many people quickly jumped to the conclusion that this will reduce emissions of CO2, but they failed to understand what it does to the emissions of particulate matter. There is already particulate matter in Western Sydney, and the dirt and soot—mainly from diesel trucks—is estimated to kill 1,400 people in Sydney every year.

The reason that this is a failed plan is that, at the moment, with modern truck engines—compared to the dirty old diesel engines that they were using—we get 18 times more particulate matter spewing out of a diesel train than comes from a modern truck engine. So even though we were halving the amount of diesel fuel we were using, we are burning that diesel fuel 18 times worse, which means that we are getting a ninefold increase in particulate matter. In Western Sydney we already have particulate matters above World Health Organisation standards, and this plan will just make it worse. If we are going to do this, we need to bring in standards on our rail network, the same as we do for our trucks in urban areas.

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