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

Last week, there was a great deal of fanfare and hoopla about the announcement between the Moorebank Intermodal Company and the SIMTA Consortium on a financial deal for the proposed Moorebank intermodal terminal. It should be noted that this is not the final go-ahead; it still has to go through all the environmental and planning approvals. During the last week there has been a lot of talk about the premise that this is going ahead which is based on three simple ideas. Firstly, it will take trucks off the road; secondly, it will reduce pollution costs; and, thirdly, it will save costs to the economy. If you do any type of analysis of those three premises, you will find that they are all completely and utterly misguided and mistaken. Firstly, take the concept that it would take trucks off the road. That is a very simplistic idea—that you take the trucks off the road and put them on rail. That seems to be a wonderful solution but that occurs only if you are taking containers and dumping them in a big hole at Moorebank. You have to consider where the containers are actually going and where the goods are actually going.

When it comes to an analysis of those questions, the Moorebank Intermodal Company put out a map of Sydney showing where the containers go which was simply and utterly misleading. The map creates the false impression that there is a large and existing market for containers in Sydney to go to Moorebank when any further analysis of where the containers go simply shows that that is factually incorrect. The majority of the containers from Port Botany that are distributed around Sydney currently go to three basic areas: they go around the Enfield area, they go to the Eastern Creek area or they go the Wetherill Park area.

Moorebank as an area for containers currently being delivered to has simply been rejected by the market. Very few containers actually go today from Port Botany to Moorebank. By locating the intermodal terminal at Moorebank, the idea is that the containers would go from Port Botany to Moorebank, be unloaded and then put onto the road and taken out to Wetherill Park or Eastern Creek. This is simply completely illogical. It will not take containers off the road; it simply transfers the starting point from Port Botany and transfers that to Moorebank. Port Botany, yes, there is road congestion there, but there is far greater road congestion in the Moorebank area and in Western Sydney. This is a very bad idea.

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