Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion put forward by the member for Fairfax about the Bruce Highway. I know the Bruce Highway very well, not so much as a member of parliament but for a number of reasons: (1) because I am married to someone from Cairns, so I make the journey up to Cairns for Christmas pretty regularly and (2) because I was a union organiser working in private schools—all the private schools in Capricornia, Wide Bay and Fairfax. I lived on the Bruce Highway for many, many years.

To put up a motion asking for more work on the Bruce Highway, as the member for Fairfax has done—seen through the prism of the fact that his government has committed 118 million fewer dollars to the Bruce Highway since the previous budget—is obviously a bit embarrassing. I wish the transport minister, the member for Gippsland, was here so that we could talk to him and ask him to explain how he let this motion come through. I hope he did not do it to embarrass a Queenslander—I know he would not do that. But obviously, as a member of the Labor Party, I am very proud of those 24 projects that are taking place on the Bruce, because I know they will benefit the Queensland economy—it would be better if 23 of them had not been funded by Labor, and we actually had some additional money coming in. But we know that there is more to be done on the Bruce Highway, particularly from Fairfax through to the Brisbane CBD.

The Bruce Highway is an essential link. I know of the traffic accident that the member for Fairfax referred to, as my next-door neighbours were in the backlog behind it. We need to get it right—particularly that connection between the Pine River and the Caloundra Road interchange, where there has been a number of safety issues and flood immunity issues. We need to get the infrastructure right so that we meet those expected future traffic volumes. Any time you head south between the Boundary Road interchange and the Pine River bridge on weekdays, and between the Caboolture River Bridge and the Pine River bridge on weekends, you know that it is snarled up. This is creating frustration and difficulty for Queensland commuters. We know that there are more houses being built in there all the time; I have a brother in the construction industry who is working around that northern part of Brisbane and the Pine Rivers area. In relation to the upgrade to this section of the highway—this $8 million project—we need to get it right, and the Queensland government needs to plan thoroughly and carefully so that the right engineering decisions are made.

Planning on this scale is no small task. The preliminary evaluations and project proposal reports must be created in order to determine how best to improve this crucial national highway. During the global financial crisis we had some very immediate attempts to get money out into the economy—some short-term, some medium-term and some longer term. The highway did receive a lot of injections of funds under the Labor Party during the global financial crisis. Obviously, with a tighter budget we just cannot pump money into it in the way that we would like to. I know that the Bruce Highway has been inundated during these major rain events; I know it affected Moreton back in 2011. We need to get this important transport corridor right, and we need to get the flood mitigation right when we construct it, rather than coming back to repair it after the floods.

I am hoping that the LNP members who are attempting to politicise the Bruce Highway remember in their speeches that we need to get the planning phase right. But it would help if the federal Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development actually had some extra funds for these projects. They are a substantial undertaking. Perhaps the Queensland government would benefit from the federal government reimbursing the $1.1 billion that has been spent on natural disaster repairs, including the flood and cyclone recovery works in Bundaberg after the damage from Cyclone Oswald, and the repairs to Brisbane's river ferry terminals. If that money flowed into the Queensland government from the Turnbull government, perhaps that could help Queensland roll out these repairs to the Bruce. That might be a better use of funds, rather than engaging in these cheap politics.

See this speech in context