Cathy McGowan (Indi, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. Will Victoria pay? How much will they pay? Who will pay first? And will it be enough? There are some other questions I need to ask, other than when the commencement date is going to be. Will you ask New South Wales to pay, because we know that the XPT also has enormous trouble with our line? Last time I was talking to the customer service people on that XPT, they showed me the bruises up and down their arms from being bumped around on the train line. The next question is: who will ultimately be responsible for delivering the project and the expenditure? If it is Victoria and New South Wales and the Australian Rail Track Corporation, who actually takes responsibility? One of the big problems we have had in the past is that no-one has actually accepted responsibility, so the poor old communities got stuck with poor service, and everyone else was not saying who should be responsible.

In terms of the plan for the $100 million, can you give us a broad outline of the types of work that are needed and how far you think the $100 million will go? Is your intention to spread it across the whole line, or would you consider doing a small portion and doing it really well? We know that there are sections that have really bad mud holes. Would we reconstruct the whole line and get a section of it working really well, or is the plan to go the whole distance?

The questions that the community is asking are not only around the actual spending of the money but also about some sort of reporting mechanism to the community. Minister, as you know, more than anything else, this problem has become really political. In the political nature of it, I think we have lost sight of the fact that it is an engineering problem that needs a solution. We have got caught up in playing politics rather than saying: how do we solve a problem? How do we get the trains working better? And then how do we have a plan for the next 50 years that is going to give us good passenger service?

Another consideration—and I would really welcome your advice—is we know the ARTC sees their main customer as freight and we understand how important it is that the ARTC raises a considerable amount of its revenue from freight, but from my perspective the passengers need to be included in that relationship. How do we have a coexisting collaboration between freight and passenger services? Can you give me some sense of the planning around that? Will that mean we need more passenger passing loops or freight passing loops? If we do—and we all know that they are expensive—how will they be paid for?

That leads me to my final question about the relationship between our $100 million—it is such a lot of money and it means so much to us—and the inland freight project. These two things obviously operate together, but the community is really interested to know how these two will coexist. Can you give us a commitment that some of our money will not be used for crossings, raising bridges or doing more freight stuff?

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