Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to continue from where I was speaking this morning on a few mistaken concepts surrounding the Moorebank Intermodal Terminal. The first is that it takes trucks off the road, the second is that it reduces pollution and the third is that it will save costs—all simplistic, motherhood statements, but when you dig down to the facts they are all completely misguided.

Firstly is the idea that it takes trucks off the road. You need to look at where the containers actually go in Sydney and you also need to look at where the goods from those containers go to work out that this will not take trucks off the road. It will simply relocate the starting point for those containers from Port Botany out to Moorebank.

The goods still have to get on the road and there are two ways that can happen. Firstly, the containers will be transported and relocated from the site. Rather than currently, where a container goes directly by truck from Port Botany to, say, Eastern Creek or to the Wetherill Park area, where most of the containers go in Sydney, the idea is that it will actually go on a train all the way around to Moorebank. It will then be unloaded from the train, put on a stack and then put on another truck and trucked from Moorebank up to Wetherill Park or Eastern Creek. This does not take trucks off the road; it puts trucks on the road. It increases the congestion in Western Sydney.

The other possibility is that the containers are actually unpacked on site and distributed from Moorebank. Again, that fails to take trucks off the road because Moorebank is too far away from the demographic centre of Sydney. The demographic centre of Sydney is around the Parramatta area. If you look, that demographic centre actually becomes a proxy for where the centre of distribution of goods will be. This is why we see the majority of the containers going into Eastern Creek, or going into the Wetherill Park area, because they are the closest major industrial areas to the demographic heart of Sydney. Instead of distributing those goods from a warehouse in those areas, if you move your distribution point down to Moorebank, your smaller trucks have more miles of Sydney to cover than they otherwise would. By all accounts, the idea that it takes trucks off the road is simply and completely mistaken.

The second failed concept is that this somehow reduces pollution in Western Sydney. It is true that if you move goods on rail, as compared to road, you use less diesel fuel. In fact, using the proponents' own numbers, you use half the diesel fuel. So, yes, it is true that with just the container movement compared to road movement, you will reduce carbon dioxide emissions—that clear, odourless, harmless gas that makes the plants grow. The real dangerous air pollution is fine and coarse particulate matter that causes lung cancer, heart disease and childhood asthma, and kills thousands of people in Sydney every single year. By taking a container off a truck and putting it on these old locomotives, these 40- and 50-year old locomotives, without any pollution controls actually increases the pollution almost tenfold. It does not double it. It does not triple it. It is almost a tenfold increase in particulate matter pollution for moving that container into Western Sydney.

The third failed logical idea of this is that it will save costs. An intermodal concept of shuffling goods out to Western Sydney is simply a case of double-handling. You have a second lift. You have to lift at the port and you also have a lift at the intermodal. We also have the costs. Moorebank is located almost on an island around the Georges River. For this project to have any hope of working—for the containers to have any hope at all of getting out of that side of Moorebank—we need almost a $750 million upgrade to access the M5. The current bridge across the M5 takes 120,000 cars a day. Compare that to the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which takes 160,000. Can you imagine fully laden semitrailers trying to merge into traffic on the Harbour Bridge and then merge across lanes? This is the insanity that they are trying to do at Moorebank. Without that $150 million, at least, upgrade the terminal will simply not work; it will be a white elephant.

And there is the opportunity cost. This money should be invested for the benefit of the nation either at Badgerys Creek, where the airport is, or out at Eastern Creek.