Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I was glad to second this motion. I thank my colleague the member for Perth and shadow parliamentary secretary for Western Australia for providing this opportunity to debate an issue that defines the wastefulness and environmental ignorance and locked-in-the-past approach of the Abbott government. It also exemplifies the complacency and hubris of the coalition when it comes to Western Australia. There can be no doubt that the Abbott and Barnett governments take WA for granted. How else but through complacency and hubris would we see a proposition to spend $2 billion on a road that the WA government never asked for—a road that flies in the face of 20 years of bipartisan port and freight planning around the creation of container capacity in the outer harbour; a road that utterly abandons the opportunity to get significantly more freight on rail; a road that goes nowhere; and a road that ignores the clear evidence of unacceptable harm to environmental and Indigenous heritage values?

As the member for Perth's motion outlines, this is a project that reared up out of nowhere. The transport and logistic bases for the road have clearly been developed after the project was announced, and the belated cost-benefit ratio analysis is highly unconvincing, not least because it does not include analysis of some logical alternatives.

One thing the Perth Freight Link has managed to achieve is a determined and unified community response. In the past few weeks we have seen a number of significant events in which people from both sides of the Swan River have questioned the project's waver-thin justification and its raft of harmful impacts. On 17 August, more than 250 people attended an electors' meeting in the City of Melville that was prompted by widespread disappointment in the lack of scrutiny the council was providing to the project, especially with regard to a number of serious concerns identified by residents. Remember that it was residents in Palmyra and Willagee who, without warning, had received letters suggesting their homes could be subject to compulsory acquisition. The residents and ratepayers expressed their dismay that virtually no account had been taken of the opposition to the destruction of the Beeliar Wetlands, the loss of 500 jobs through the closure of businesses along Stock Road and the impact of diesel particulates throughout the community as a result of a freight transport approach that is sanguine to increasing truck numbers by three or four times. Not surprisingly, a motion was passed at this meeting that called on Melville Council to reverse its unexamined support for Roe 8 and the Perth Freight Link. It should be noted that it was the outcry by residents in Palmyra and Willagee that prompted the WA Minister for Transport to float the possibility that High Street and Stock Road could be cut out of the Perth Freight Link altogether in favour of a tunnel or trench through White Gum Valley in Beaconsfield. This thought bubble has simply inflicted the government's confusion further afield, shifting the alarm onto yet another neighbourhood.

On Sunday, 29 August in the Rally at the Valley, some 300 White Gum Valley residents gathered in a local park to make it clear that they reject this kind of chaotic scattergun planning and the proposal to carve a trench of diesel fumes through residential streets, past schools, and childcare centres. Earlier that week, on 25 August, Premier Barnett attended a North Fremantle community forum in his own electorate, along with transport and urban planning expert, Professor Peter Newman. Premier made a number of interesting statements. He initially claimed that trucks might be forced to use the Perth Freight Link but then backed away from that statement. He also said that Roe 8 would cost less than $500 million, contradicting both his own Treasurer and his Minister for Transport, who, at a joint appearance on 12 August, said Roe 8 would cost $741 million.

On 1 September there was a public forum in Cottesloe which Premier Barnett declined to attend, saying it was too political, at which John Hammond, Peter Newman and Labor opposition leader, Mark McGowan, spoke. Residents expressed their fears that the massive increase in the number of trucks to the inner harbour would inevitably result in substantially more trucks on Curtain Avenue and expressed their disbelief that the WA government was not pushing forward with the long-held plans for the container capacity through the outer harbour.

Finally, on 2 September, a public forum in the town of East Fremantle featured Mayor Jim O'Neill, Cole Hendrigan from Curtin University's Sustainability Policy Institute, and Kate Kelly from Save Beeliar Wetlands. Again, a motion was passed on the basis of overwhelming opposition to both the process and the substance of the Perth Freight Link. At the same time as the Abbott and Barnett governments prepare to spend $2 billion on a truck freeway and private toll road that will ensure rising truck numbers throughout the Perth metro area, there are real congestion problems that go unaddressed in WA. The Barnett government should be only too aware that it has broken a number of promises when it comes to key public transport projects, that freight on rail has dropped steeply on its watch, and that it has failed to advance the development of the outer harbour. That is the tragedy of the Perth Freight Link. Not only is it a dud in itself but also it proposes to waste taxpayers' money that should be applied to infrastructure projects of real merit and urgency, including the Community Connect South project to reduce chronic congestion.

Debate adjourned.

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