Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise today to support this motion by the member for Barker and also the call by the Australian Automobile Association that 100 per cent of the fuel levy collected be reinvested in the road network. Just to put some context around this, every motorist who fills their vehicle at the petrol bowser pays 47.7c per litre in fuel excise, which adds up to close to $15 billion per year. That is a road user charge, and I'll come back to the road user charge in a moment. But what I want to emphasise here is that under the coalition, by 2021-22, 98 per cent of that money was being reinvested in the road network, moving up to 100 per cent by 2022-23. When the new government, the Albanese government, handed down its budget in October, it was revealed that this investment of the fuel excise would decrease to 88 per cent by 2025-26. As a member for a regional electorate covering 1.1 million square kilometres with a massive road network, this is completely unacceptable.

I want to put on the record the achievement of my grain growers this year in producing a second consecutive record grain crop of 26 million tonnes—and growing as those last truck loads arrive at the bins. That harvest will need to be transported to the port predominantly by road, and the road network is not up to the job. Unfortunately, we're seeing a high number of accidents, including fatal accidents, on our road network. Just last week, owners of the two major trucking companies that haul the state's grain were out in the media calling for an immediate upgrade of both the Albany Highway and the South Coast Highway where a lot of that grain travels into the Albany port or across to the Esperance port.

Shire president of Plantagenet, Chris Pavlovich, made the point that the Albany Highway needs an upgrade investment of 15 kilometres per year. A well-constructed road lasts about 30 years, so a 400-kilometre road needs an upgrade of around 15 kilometres every year to keep that road up to scratch. At the moment we're not going anywhere near that. We're putting bandaids on the problem and it's not getting any better. In fact, at this point in time it's getting worse.

I just want to touch on some of the initiatives of the previous government across my electorate that I'm very proud of. There's the $120 million road safety improvement program. Constituents of mine driving around the very large electorate of O'Connor will have noticed the extra metre of seal on probably thousands of kilometres of roads. This dramatically increases the safety of those roads. When cars leave the centre strip, they're not going into gravel and getting into a swerve and ending up rolling into the gutter or, even worse, hitting a tree. They are still on bitumen and they can correct and get back on the road. That's a really important road safety improvement that we funded.

The $160 million agriculture supply chain infrastructure program will go some way to restoring and improving the road network to get that grain crop into the bins and into the port over the next 12 months. There's also the $170 million ring road at Albany, which is a major investment to improve the efficiency of the road freight into the Albany port. It's a project I'm very proud of.

In the last minute that I have I want to bring the conversation back to the fuel excise and the fact that it is a road user charge. We had the Grattan Institute in the Fin Review today, no doubt with the blessing of the Treasurer, floating the idea of removing the rebate which off-road fuel users receive. That would be the miners of my electorate and the farmers of my electorate. This country rides on the back of the WA mining industry, and if that industry is hit with this particular cost it will impact on new investment in projects and it will certainly impact on the profitability of current projects which pay the bills. This will lead to less output for this country. Thank you.

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