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

I am sure he appreciates the opportunity of having a little bit of an education. I would also say to the member for Hughes: in all this concern about our future, our children, our grandchildren and the cost of electricity, would he look at the impact of climate change, the health effects that are going to occur in the community if we do not face up to the need to address these very serious issues of climate change, and the fact that investment in renewable energy is about providing us with a long-term capacity to provide energy that is not going to cost us the earth, literally. I will comment that even the Warburton report recognised that, in the long term, investment in renewable energy will lead to a decline in the cost of energy.

What I wanted to talk about today is how a provision that is, again, woven into this budget—and indeed the last budget—is causing very poor planning outcomes in Perth. We know that the Prime Minister famously has been reluctant or has refused to allow a rational approach to be taken to the investment in infrastructure in urban areas and that he has, as stated in his Battlelines, a deep and profound ideological opposition to public transport. He does not believe that it provides people with that same opportunity to be a king in their castle. He believes that, because people are going from different places to different destinations, it is not possible to make public transport that is fast, efficient and attractive to the commuter. We know, and people around the world know, that that is abject nonsense.

But we have this incredible primitive ideology now entrenching itself into government policy. And we have this extraordinary decision that has been made even though 80 per cent of Australia's population live in big cities. Big cities, it is understood, rely on public transport to be able to provide the mobility that allows them to exploit the agglomeration benefits of being a big city. The whole thing that that makes a city work is you bring all these people together that have got specialist skills and a diversity of skills and that together creates the creativity and the range of skills that you need to drive the economy forward. All of that depends on there being mobility.

We absolutely understand that even in the Middle East these days they are absolutely committed to massive urban transport projects that are going ahead in Doha, Dubai and Ryad—all throughout the Middle East. We understand that we need to do this but we have got here as our Prime Minister this cultural primitive locked in the ideology of the 1950s and 1960s who literally cannot see it.

The justification of the Prime Minister was 'we are going to walk away from rail and we will only fund roads, but that is not an anti-rail stance because what we will do is we will free up money and that will allow the states to build the rail because we will be spending more money on the roads'. Of course we knew that was never going to happen. And we knew that what was going to be the inevitable consequence was that the state governments would be chasing the dollars so they would move their commitments away from rail projects into road projects so that they can access those virtual dollars. Because you do not get 100 per cent federal funding of a project. Normally you would only get around 50 per cent funding of a project, hence you are creating a perverse incentive for roads to be privileged over public transport.

There is no clearer case of this than in Perth. At the last election, the Premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, went to the election with two key promises in two marginal seats that he was seeking to win. One was that he was going to build a rail link to the Perth airport and beyond—fully costed, fully funded. That was going to be built by 2016, I think it was. And then he was going to build a MAX Light Rail, which was going to be a light rail system around the inner suburbs of Perth heading up into the middle-ranking northern suburbs—fully funded, fully costed he said.

Since then, the Premier has of course decided that he can no longer afford these. So in 2013, not that long ago, he made that fully funded and fully costed commitment. The Perth airport rail link has been delayed now by some two years to help him manage his costs. And the MAX Light Rail system has been totally and utterly abandoned because he said he just did not have the money. However, the Premier has been able to bring onto the agenda at $1.6-billion road project that was never an election commitment. So we cannot afford to do those rail projects that he committed to at the last election but he can do a road project because he is out there chasing the federal dollars.

We have seen that the proposal that we have now, the road proposal, the Perth freight link, has been the most poorly designed and poorly thought-through project because it was done without any planning, because it was done in response to an ideological imperative. We had a situation where the federal Labor government in 2013 had actually put into the budget $500 million for Perth rail projects. It was not confined to a particular project but for whatever project the state government would want to bring forward for priority funding, $500 million.

That $500 million had to come out of the budget because of the Abbott ideology. But they could not just leave this big gaping hole there; they had to find another project. They had to drum up something. So they created this project, the Perth freight link, which is an amalgamation of three projects. One was already funded under the Labor government, which is an upgrade of Leach Highway and High Street. It was a $59 million project, creating improved pathways into the Fremantle Port. But they added to that the Roe Highway stage 8 and they added this amazing new design of proposed work on Stock Road. That is a $1.6 billion project.

This has been done in the absence of any proper planning in a strategic sense. We know that even the Treasurer is acknowledging that the Fremantle container facility will be at peak capacity in the next 10 to 15 years. However, the projection of the Perth freight link showed that that will happen somewhat sooner than that and that a new port in the Kwinana region will have to be built by about 2021. So within two years of this Perth freight link into the Fremantle port being opened, we will actually have to build a new port in Kwinana on the Cockburn Sound. We will even have to build infrastructure into that. I expect that that new port or that new facility will be privately built, but we will have to provide road and rail access into that port.

How much better would it be if we were to take that money and ensure that we were putting road and rail infrastructure into a port that will be around for decades to come rather than building it because of this need to fill a hole created by Prime Minister Tony Abbott's antagonism to public transport, that we have to get this project, cobble it together, chuck it in and try to make it work?

In the last week we have had the state minister for transport saying, 'We had really robust planning, but I'm not actually sure that we have got the right route into the port.' We are supposed to be in the middle of the project and now, even the state minister for transport, when he realised how many houses and businesses he will have to knock over, is querying whether he has the route of this Perth freight link right. Again, it is absolute and complete chaos and anarchy, caused by an ideological limitation on the part of the Prime Minister.

I urge that we go back to the drawing board. Let us have a look at this project and at what we can do with this $1.6 million. Should we be investing in public transport infrastructure? It is currently predicted that Perth, by 2031, will be the congestion capital of Australia. We have got a far lower rate of public transport usage than the cities of Melbourne and Sydney. So if we want to avoid going down this predictive path of being the congestion capital of Australia, we will really have to ramp up our public transport product and ensure that we get people out of their cars, into modern efficient public transport that can—and it has been demonstrated that it can—attract commuters and help us solve this congestion problem.

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