Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I continue to update the House on the southern Brisbane bypass, the Gateway and Logan motorways and the tollway, which the state government of Queensland have implemented over the past decade. The Queensland government has in its recent budget increased the toll at Kuraby and Stapleton roads, the Paradise Road interchange and Loganlea by 10c. Members may think that 10c does not mean a lot, but, in the end, residents in my electorate have the only toll roads in the state of Queensland. We are paying 1.2 million cents a day—$120,000 a day—in tolls. Over the course of a week, that is the best part of $1 million in tax. Let us call it what it is. It is a tax that the state government of Queensland imposes on residents of the southside to access the best road that exists in that part of the world.

The consequence of this is that heavy vehicles in particular, but also many passenger cars, go around the tollbooth, particularly the one at Persse Road, Runcorn. If the Queensland government would just meet me halfway on this—I have called for a complete end to the toll on the motorways—and get rid of the tollbooth at Persse Road at Runcorn then we would see fewer cars on Warrigal Road, fewer cars on Gowan Road and fewer cars going around that particular tollbooth. The Queensland government in its wisdom in the most recent budget has lifted that toll to $1.80 per vehicle per journey. So, if you talk to people in Runcorn, as I have—people with three cars in the family, travelling towards the port of Brisbane—you find out that they are spending the best part of $50 a week just to get to and from work along a road that nobody else in Queensland pays a toll for.

So I again call on local state members—they are very important people; they are ministers—to take some action. Judy Spence is the member for Mount Gravatt and Stephen Robertson is the member for Stretton. One is the police minister; one is the health minister. I do not know what unions they belong to. I think Stephen Robertson was once the federal president of the firefighters association, but every firey I have ever met said that, if he ever got on the end of a fire line and the water was turned on, he would get launched into deep space. He is just another one of those professional apparatchiks that the Labor Party put into parliament to get them out of the union movement. I think Judy Spence is probably a teacher. She is probably a member of the teachers union. As we know in this place, you have got to be a member of a union to be elected as a member of the Labor Party anywhere in Australia. Judy Spence does not realise that the Australian government’s big trucks, no bucks trial—costing $1.7 million—has taken 221,000 trucks off roads in my local area between 10 o’clock at night and five o’clock in the morning. There are no toll roads for trucks while that continues. The Queensland government stands condemned. (Time expired)