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

I am not going to be rubbing the noses of my eastern states colleagues in the victories of the Dockers and West Coast on Saturday. No, I will leave that for another fortnight. I just want to update the House on the next exciting instalment of the Barnett and Abbott governments' war against information: their valiant battles to ensure that the people of Western Australia do not have to see any documentation concerning the Perth Freight Link.

We have been having these battles for 18 months with the Commonwealth, so we thought we would try another approach: we would go to Main Roads WA and see if we could get documents from them. We got very excited when we got a phone call on Friday: 'You can come and pick the documents up.' We raced off, and I have to say that our joy was short lived, colleagues, because—

Opposition members: Oh!

it was!—they used a whole cartridge of cyan on producing these documents. Apparently we cannot have any information about the inner harbour; we are not allowed to have any information on traffic volumes; and we are not allowed to have any information on road upgrade options. Apparently, all of these have to be kept secret to protect the process of deliberation, even though a decision was made on this lemon over 18 months ago. The taxpayers of WA— (Time expired)

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