Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is an absolute pleasure to be speaking today on this wonderful report from the Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services. The report is called The great freight task: is Australia’s transport network up to the challenge? You would have to conclude just from the title that the answer to that question is a resounding no. We are not up to the challenge as yet. But I am sure that if the government were to look closely at this report and take on the recommendations from our committee, then we would be well on our way to actually meeting this challenge in the future. It is an enormous challenge—all well documented in this very good quality report.

I would like to thank the members of the committee: the chair, Mr Paul Neville; the deputy chair, Mr Steve Gibbons; Sharon Bird; Barry Haase; Jill Hall; Dennis Jensen; Stewart McArthur; Kym Richardson; and Alby Schultz. I also thank the committee secretariat, who have done a wonderful job: Janet Holmes, Ian Dundas, Tas Luttrell, Samantha Mannette, Courtney Krouse, Jazmine De Roza and Marlene Dundas. I wanted to put their names on the record because they have worked very hard. It is a small but good thing to acknowledge the hard work they do. It is not just about the committee members; it is also about the committee secretariat, who do all the travelling and cobble together all the comments that we other people make in our deliberations and at our hearings.

This was an excellent report—in fact, it was an excellent inquiry—because it really does look at a contemporary challenge that we all face. There was a great spirit of bipartisanship in this report. This is a unanimous report of all the committee members, which is wonderful to see. It took on a very serious issue about the role of Australia’s regional arterial road and rail networks, the national freight transport task, the relationship between road and rail and their connectivity to ports and the policies required to make all that happen. I was very pleased to be part of what I think will be in future years a very significant document which outlines some very good recommendations.

This is a massive document for good reason; it is 350-odd pages long. There is a lot of work to be done and there was a lot of work done by the committee to ensure that we did cover off and check off on all of those things right across the country. I do not think we left a road unturned, a rail uninspected, a port unvisited or a recommendation brought by industry or by stakeholders unlooked at. So it is large for those reasons. The committee made 25 recommendations, all of which I think the government ought to closely examine and pay some attention to.

If I distil this report down to just a few a few themes, it might give people reading or listening to this statement some idea of what it is about. It is really about the federal government taking a real interest and playing a real role. I do not think there is any question about that. I do not say that in a political way; I am just saying that the federal government ought to take a real interest in all of the issues outlined here and, from that interest, play a role. This is also about the need for infrastructure being beyond that of a particular state, a particular council, a particular region or a particular port. The infrastructure need in this country is in the national interest and, therefore, should be approached from that perspective. This is not about pork-barrelling to give somebody an advantage in a particular seat. It is much bigger than that and ought to be treated that way.

This is also the story of the need for cooperation at the COAG level. I believe very strongly in this. What is recommended in here and what will make a difference in the infrastructure tasks in this country is cooperation at the COAG level. It is about including local governments and state governments. It is about federal government being involved at all three levels and including the private industry and other stakeholders. This must happen. It is also about the coordination of projects. Projects need to be coordinated in a holistic way, with the view that individual projects themselves impact on other projects, on other roads, on rail, on ports and on a whole range of interconnecting modal hubs.

Finally, it is about funding. I do not think there is any question that you cannot do all of the things I have just mentioned without committing dollars. There are dollars to be committed. In this report we stipulate a number of costs, but in the end those costs should be viewed as investments. They should be viewed as a benefit to the whole country and to whole regions, as jobs creators. This is not just about cost; it is about funding an investment. That is what all these recommendations are about.

I am quite pleased with the words that are contained in this report. It could have easily become a political document. It can be used in a political sense, but I do not think the document itself is political. The document is about infrastructure, roads and the freight task. It is about all those things that we all agree need to happen. The document can be used in any political way that people choose to make points about regions, about what is happening in particular areas and what has not been happening. For me this document is also about that.

I might go through a couple of the recommendations that I think are important. Recommendation 1 states:

The Committee recommends that the Minister for Transport and Regional Services require the Australian Transport Commission and the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics to undertake the establishment of a national transport database.

That is actually quite important. We cannot understand the full scope of a problem until we have had a good look at the problem, a bit of an audit. I say at this stage, in a political way, that Labor’s policy is to have a body called Infrastructure Australia, which would do what is recommended here in very much the same essence and spirit. I think that is part of the fix, part of the solution, and what we need in this country. I fully support that first recommendation and the following one, which backs it up.

There are some important notes about ports. The committee recommends that COAG undertake the establishment of an Australia-wide set of standards. Again, this is a good recommendation. I think most people reading this report would say that is just common sense. It is, and it ought to happen. There ought to be a great level of cooperation between governments to ensure that we can have a set of standards. My view has always been that, if you have six different standards, one of them will be better than the others and there will be one that will be at the bottom of that list that is not as good as the others. Therefore, we should draw a line up to the best standard and say: ‘This is where we can reach. This is where we should all aim.’ It is not about bringing anyone down to a standard; it is about bringing them up to a standard. I think that is very important.

There is a recommendation to set up a critical port infrastructure fund, which I agree with. I think we should go one step further and, through the Infrastructure Australia body, also set up an infrastructure fund to look at not only the critical task of what is in this report but at the much broader task of taking that funding, that directive, from being purely a discretionary fund, or a fund that comes about at election times, to being much more closely related to national interest and the needs there. There are a whole range of recommendations with that in mind.

In the area of rail, the report also looks at the particular techniques used in the Hunter Valley coal chain, which is an exemplary model. It recommends that we should look at those techniques much more closely and perhaps spin them off into other areas, which I think is a good recommendation. In the area of road infrastructure, the report recommends urgent consideration to assist state and local governments to fund upgrades of roads. I do not think anyone could argue with that seriously. We have come to the point in this country where we all need to look seriously at how we fund roads. When somebody drives on a road, they do not ask themselves, ‘Who funds this road?’; they just say, ‘This road needs fixing.’ Fixing the roads is what ought to happen, not disagreement about who is responsible for the funding. It should just happen.

There are a whole range of other recommendations that I think are good—about intermodal facilities; about 40-foot containers and what should be done there in terms of world trends and world’s-best standard; and about looking at the role of the three tiers of government, which I have already mentioned. I think that is critical to the quality of this report: it acknowledges that the three tiers of government must be involved. They need to have an equal partnership. I certainly understand the difference between the capacity of a local authority, the capacity of a state government and the capacity of the federal government to pay for something. But just imagine if all three got together in agreement, with cooperation, and actually looked at fixing some problems in the national interest. We would have a very different economy in this country, one that would leap ahead from where it is today. Finally, the report looks at some intelligent tracking technology and at cross-border issues. I have always had the view that responsibility does not end at an arbitrary line on a map, be it a state line or a local boundary line. We need cooperation; we need all three levels of government. I recommend this report. (Time expired)

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to speak again without closing the debate.

Leave granted.

As the Chair of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services, I take great pleasure in this report, The great freight task: is Australia’s transport network up to the challenge? It has involved over two years work for the committee and, as the member for Oxley said, we put a big effort into it. We took 194 submissions, held 30 public hearings, did countless inspections and visited a lot of ports. We visited Mackay, Gladstone, Brisbane and Newcastle. We took evidence from Sydney and visited Wollongong and Port Kembla. We visited Melbourne twice. We visited Portland, Darwin and Geraldton. We did not actually visit Perth but we took evidence from Perth, Albany, Bunbury and Esperance. So it was very comprehensive. We also took evidence from ports in Tasmania and from Adelaide and so on.

So I think we can say with a fair degree of justification that this is a very thorough report. On page 342 there is a very interesting matrix that gives a profile of each of the ports—what their capacities are, what their failures are. It gives throughput, current and projected; depth, current and proposed; and the key infrastructure projects, road and rail, that need to be put in place to make each port work.

I suppose the main conclusion we came to was that all our ports have a need for funding. We felt that the magic figure—this figure just kept recurring—was about $70 million. Some would be a lot cheaper and others would be a lot dearer. For example, at the Port of Brisbane there is six kilometres of work to be done, and that will cost about $150 million. But, if you look across all the major ports of Australia—not the minor ones—you would have to say an average of about $70 million is required. Where that money comes from is an interesting question. We suggest that a new fund over and above AusLink be put in place. The idea of that would be to look at critical infrastructure projects. We feel that we should spend about $600 million a year on that for five years, and that would, if you like, be the catch-up.

As we went around Australia, we saw some things that are crying out to be done. For example, the connectivity of Mount Gambier and Penola to Portland seemed to us to be one of the seminal things that have been waiting to be done for some time. And the Maldon to Dombarton section of rail should be put in place behind Wollongong and Port Kembla, which would allow coal to be taken from the Hunter Valley to that port—and Port Kembla is an underutilised port. That would allow coal to be taken down in reasonably large quantities without going through the Sydney suburban traffic system. Also, the Port of Brisbane, which is expanding rapidly, has a road connection problem.

The one that stands out that we really have to look at is Melbourne. That might sound strange from me, coming from Queensland, but Melbourne is the hub, the biggest port and has the most containers. Melbourne radiates out to Adelaide and through Adelaide up to Darwin, over to Perth and up to Sydney and Brisbane. It is the pivotal port, and if you do not get that one right then you have to rethink the whole logistics of freight in this country. We felt that channel deepening there was absolutely essential. If Melbourne is going to take Panamax- and Cape-size vessels and even larger ones, then the channels have to be deepened. I know it is an environmental problem and I know it will cause some heartburn, but Melbourne has amazing facilities. Its wharfage is excellent and it can take cars, containers and bulk. It can do just about anything, but it has a lot of impediments—for example, it needs the channel deepening that I mentioned; Footscray Road needs grade separation for road and rail; there is the Westgate Bridge, but during peak hours an alternative river crossing is needed; the Monash Freeway that links the south-eastern metropolitan region to the port precincts is experiencing chronic congestion; high-productivity vehicles need to be able to use Dock Link Road to access the North Dynon Rail Terminal; and there needs to be a rail link to the Lascelles Terminal.

If you get Melbourne right, then you have the ability to do other things, like have the new inland north-south rail line from Melbourne to Brisbane, or from Melbourne to Toowoomba initially. The Queensland government has already approved the Gladstone to Toowoomba section of that line, and that will be largely self-sufficient as it will take between nine and 12 new coalmines on stream. There is a leap of faith involved in going from Melbourne to Brisbane or Melbourne to Toowoomba. The combination of those two lines would totally revolutionise inland traffic, taking it through the most productive parts of Australia. If it were done to a point where it could be double-stacked, then that would be amazing and it would put Australia on an international footing in rail. We can do it and we did it from Rockhampton to Brisbane. The Queensland government has done tilt rail. Trains can do 160 kilometres an hour, even on narrow-gauge line. So this can be done. Vince O’Rourke, the former head of QR—who, in my opinion, is the best railman in this country—says: ‘Why don’t we do one train line and do it well? Show ourselves and the world what we are capable of and, quite apart from that, create one major fantastic artery.’ As he said, we have been patching up for years, and it shows.

We had a look at the branch lines too. Mr Deputy Speaker Quick, as a Tasmanian, you would know what a tragedy it is, because you lost yours ahead of most other places. They are crumbling. We heard from a Mr Zsombor from Canada, who worked in Alberta and developed a model where branch lines could be sold to interest groups. It might be the shire council, a grain growers organisation, a local community group or even a group of farmers, and they would sell the line to them for its disposal value—its junking value, I suppose: what you would get for it if it were to close. They would sell it to them for that and give them some strategic seed funding. In Canada, they also have a pool of wagons—and we could look at how the Australian government could assist with that sort of thing. It is possible, by having local ownership, to retain those lines.

The other thing that stood out in this inquiry was that this nonsense at borders has to stop. Now that we are tackling the business of the Murray-Darling and trying to look beyond state borders as to how these systems work, we have to take that same approach to the border crossing of road and rail. This business of Queensland waiting for New South Wales and New South Wales waiting for Queensland and both of them waiting for the Commonwealth and then having little spats while the Tugan bypass languishes for four years has to stop. We say that that could be achieved by the judicious use of what we call interstate commissions. Each border would have a commission made up of engineers, local authorities and government representatives—not necessarily members of parliament but key people in the bureaucracy—and these cross-border events would be funded 50:25:25. I think it is something worth doing.

This was a great inquiry. I compliment my deputy, Steve Gibbons, and the other members of my committee, as well as the secretariat led by Janet Holmes and Tas Luttrell, and especially the researchers, who put in such a big effort. We predicted nine years ago that this was going to happen again, so we just hope that this time the government takes a more positive approach to this report.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Hinkler and others on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services for their report entitled The great freight task: is Australia’s transport network up to the challenge? I have not had time to read the whole report, but, after looking at its recommendations and flicking through some of its other pages, I think it contains a lot of very good material.

It was obvious to me from the contribution by the member for Hinkler, the chair of the committee, and that of one of the opposition members, Sharon Bird, when she spoke in the main chamber earlier this afternoon, that there was a coming together of views on this issue. It is a unanimous report that engages the problem, as the member for Hinkler said, of trying to get across state boundaries by addressing some of the issues at the local, state and federal government levels. So I would concur with what the member for Hinkler has said. I just hope that this report, which many people have put a lot of effort into, does not end up gathering dust somewhere. As the opposition and the government are one on this issue, I would urge them both to keep on with it. Irrespective of who wins the next election, there are matters in this report that need to be addressed for the national good, and we should pursue them.

I am pleased to see that some of these issues have been addressed in an objective sense. That is very important because it gives the report much more credibility. In the Hunter area, there are various problems with the coal-loading facilities at the Newcastle port.

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The supply chain is a great idea.

Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. There are some very good recommendations in the report. Some of them cost a lot of money and some do not. The government and the parliament need to look at them. The Ardglen tunnel near Willow Tree, which becomes part of the New England electorate after the next election, is an issue: it is a bottleneck. However, it is probably not the worst of the bottlenecks on that line at the moment because it has loading facilities at one end. Some improvements need to be made in the Hunter because, as sure as night follows day, the development of the coal industry north of the Murrurundi Range and the Liverpool Range will require infrastructure into the future. I was talking to one of the coal industry people only the day before yesterday—they happen to be next door to us—on a range of issues and it came up again that the problem they have now is what they knew they were going to have four years ago. Obviously, they have to be in front of the game, and this report identifies some of the areas that need to be addressed.

For those who might not be familiar with that area, I mention the Ardglen Tunnel. In terms of inland rail—I refer now to the Ernst and Young report, although I am not sure what this document actually identifies—about 220 million tonnes of freight comes from various locations within the eastern part of Australia; of that, 110 million tonnes, or 50 per cent, comes from the Hunter north-west corridor, which is within 300 or 400 kilometres of Newcastle. Half of the total freight loading on our inland rail comes from that area.

With the development of the coal industry in the Gunnedah basin, coal production currently runs at about 15 million tonnes but will escalate very quickly to 25 to 40 million tonnes. Just to put that into perspective, about 4.5 million tonnes of coal is taken from Melbourne to Brisbane or Brisbane to Melbourne on the inland rail route, which is being discussed here with some gusto. Nine to 10 per cent of that total amount will come out of the Gunnedah-Boggabri basin area within the next decade, so obviously Newcastle becomes critical. Some people would suggest that much of it—even this report mentions it—could go out through Gladstone. Gladstone is going to have its own infrastructure problems. In addition, there is an assumption here that the coal industry will stay on a glide path for some time, although others might disagree with that assumption. However, the Ardglen Tunnel will become very important. Some $100 million to $300 million, which is a relatively low cost, could expedite the freight component out of the Boggabri-Gunnedah basin through to Newcastle, with the improved extra coal loader and a number of other things that have to occur there. I bring that to the notice of the parliament as being a very important piece of infrastructure into the future.

Inland rail options have been discussed in the Ernst and Young inquiry and the government has put out another $15 million to look at the western corridor et cetera. Obviously, being the member for New England, I can speak with some authority about the New England rail corridor. The corridor’s northern half is disused at the moment, but it is still there. Many people—particularly the Mayor of Glen Innes, Steve Toms, and the New England Local Government Group, headed up by Maria Woods—have raised that issue with me as the member. My view—and I am pleased to say the view of most New Englanders—is that the inland rail route should go where it does the most good for the nation. If that happens to be through the New England corridor, well and good. If it happens to be through Moree and somewhere else, well and good. However, I think the government needs to look at that issue and at the costs closely too.

I notice here that Everald Compton, whom I regard as a friend and a courageous Australian, has mentioned that something like $800 million is needed to get the rail upgraded from Melbourne to Toowoomba and another $2 billion is needed for Toowoomba to Brisbane. That indicates to me that there are some real problems there, and I know that there are some technical and topographical problems. One thing I would suggest to the committee and to the parliament—I notice that it is mentioned also in here—is that going from Warwick through Rathdowney across to the eastern coastline is a much cheaper option than going from Toowoomba to Brisbane. The New England Local Government Group, in conjunction with the Warwick group and particularly the Mayor of Glen Innes, Steve Toms, have identified that potential cost saving: that Rathdowney to Warwick alternative to the $2 billion option from Toowoomba to Brisbane. You could still establish a link for export bulk commodities from Warwick through to Toowoomba and then north to Gladstone.

All I suggest is that, if the government—including the potential new government—is serious about this, the infrastructure must be located where it will be the most cost-effective. We must look at all these options rather than at just the political ones that are out there now. A number of documents that identify various cost savings are floating around and need to be scrutinised very closely. I would encourage the member for Hinkler to pursue that issue.

In conclusion and on a fairly parochial basis—I am very up-front about the fact that I come from a railway town called Werris Creek; I do not want to be seen as attempting to pork-barrel my local community—I want to speak about a specific issue, particularly given the possible importance of Werris Creek to the inland rail network. If the Dubbo link through Werris Creek goes west out to Moree or north up through New England, Werris Creek will play a pivotal role in the majority of freight being transported south; that will probably be up to 40 million tonnes within the next 10 years. The member for Hinkler would be well aware of these issues.

The increase to 72 wagon trains—it is currently being trialled, and it is only a matter of time before we get to 72 or 80 wagons—heading for Newcastle will cause a major blockage at the southern railway crossing. It is occurring now with 40 wagon trains; it will get much worse with 72 wagon trains. In terms of infrastructure, the requirement to remove that obstacle should be part of the forward planning. You cannot have ambulances and those sorts of vehicles being held up for long periods because there are a lot of trains using that line. Almost all of them will be blocking that railway crossing unless some technological expertise can be used to solve the problem. I just mention that today. I think an overpass is required, but perhaps other options need to be looked at.

Debate (on motion by Mr Danby) adjourned.