Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The East-West Link put Melbourne's liveability under threat, and the community fought it off. You would think that Labor and Liberal governments planning toll roads would have learnt their lesson from this, but now the Victorian Labor government wants to build its own west-east link. The West Gate Tunnel toll road will funnel tens of thousands of cars onto the streets of North Melbourne, West Melbourne, Docklands, Carlton, Parkville and the CBD. It will result in more traffic, more pollution and more noise for residents. It will smash the liveability of communities in Docklands, North Melbourne and West Melbourne. You don't fix congestion by building more roads.

So who benefits from this? Not my constituents in Melbourne. Not the environment. Not the people in Melbourne's west, who are crying out for decent public transport links for the city but who instead face the same traffic jams, just in a slightly different place. Not the people who live on local streets that are used as B-double truck routes; who need a long-term fix via a rail freight plan, not a bandaid solution from a company that profits from inducing car traffic. Not commuters in the east, who now face higher toll road costs to pay for all of this. And not the people on the public housing waiting list, who will be left waiting as the toll road gets built over E-Gate when we could be building 1,000 new public housing homes.

It's Transurban who will be laughing all the way to the bank. Yesterday they announced that their net profits increased last year by 850 per cent and that it pulls in over $2 billion a year in tolls. And it looks like they are writing Labor's transport and planning agenda. This is a test for Victorian Labor. Will Daniel Andrews and Richard Wynne back the community and public transport, or back Transurban? (Time expired)

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