Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House calls on the Australian Government to:

(1) suspend its commitment to funding the $1.6 billion Perth Freight Link until the Western Australian Government is able to provide credible, substantiated evidence of:

(a) how and when the Western Australian Government is proposing to fund the missing bridge link over the Swan River and the new proposed tunnel;

(b) the optimum capacity of the Fremantle container terminal and the projected timing of when that capacity will be reached;

(c) the planning so far for the development of the new container terminal in Cockburn Sound;

(d) how the Western Australian Government proposes to increase the percentage of rail freight into the Fremantle Port when it has failed to make any headway in its six years in office; and

(2) release all documents relating to the planning and cost benefit analysis of this project.

A big issue in the Canning by-election is the growing congestion on the roads in Perth's south-eastern corridor where you see suburbs literally mushrooming along Armadale Road, pouring thousands of extra vehicles onto those roads each day. Quite frankly the road infrastructure is unable to cope with this. It has led to gridlock as residents seek to access the job-rich areas to the north and to the west of Armadale. Labor has committed $145 million to the cost of the Community Connect South project, which would alleviate these bottlenecks. But the Abbott and Barnett governments find themselves incapable of making the same commitment, because instead they are pouring almost $2 billion into the highly ideological and poorly planned Perth Freight Link.

Today I have written to the Commonwealth Auditor-General asking him to conduct an audit of this project. I have referred the Auditor-General to the extraordinary statements of Premier Colin Barnett to his concerned constituents in a meeting in North Freemantle two weeks ago. In respect of the $935 million section 2 of the project he said, and he described this as the most fundamental point that people needed to have in mind, 'We haven’t even selected a route, haven't decided if it's going to be above ground or in a tunnel'—and tunnels are incredibly expensive—'haven’t decided yet whether it will be done at various interchanges, haven't designed it, haven't done the engineering work, haven't done the environmental work and haven't done the planning work. So the connection is still a long, long way away.' He said that trying to console them. And he said, 'I wish I could stand here and say I've got all the answers. I don’t. And I guess the only excuse I can make is that Roe 8 is ready to go. We have yet to do the work that is required on the connection to the port.' Here we have over 50 per cent of the cost of this project that quite clearly has not been planned. How can we possibly have a cost-benefit analysis done on a project where, as the Premier of Western Australia is telling us, we do not even know where it is going to go? We do not even know if it is going to be subterranean or above the ground. Simply, as he says, the work has not been done. So how can we be committing this $930 million of federal taxpayers' money to a project about which we know so very little?

The secrecy around this project has reached new heights. Members will be aware of my long-term battles against the Commonwealth in trying to collect documents. Late last week I received a request from Main Roads for the fourth extension of time for a mere 53 documents relating to this project. We know what the documents are—a confined number of documents—and they have asked for their fourth extension of time. They have used every lame excuse under the sun to try to justify not revealing these projects. Quite clearly this is a matter of enormous embarrassment. I also received a very interesting FOI today. We actually did get a couple of documents, diary entries out of Senator Cormann's office. It confirms that this was a deal stitched up with Treasurer Mike Nahan, Senator Cormann and the assistant minister for infrastructure at a federal level. They had their meeting in that office, and only two weeks later—we have now got evidence—the poor, hapless WA Minister for Transport went into the meeting expecting that he was going to be making his pitch for funding of the outer harbour and came out with this Perth Freight Link. But, as the Premier says, he has belled the cat. The Premier has said: 'We haven't done the work on this project. We don't know where it's going. It is a long way off.' Well, I say to you, let us withdraw that funding and fund the south connect project. Spend this money on roads where we have done planning and where we know what needs to be done to solve the congestion problems in Perth. (Time expired)

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The gall and hypocrisy of the Labor Party and, in particular, the member for Perth is astounding. On this issue, she knows the actions to sell off earmarked lands at Fremantle prevented the highway from going from port to airport as originally envisaged by the Stephenson and Hepburn report in 1955.

I recall being on the transport committee and, quite frankly, asking the question: what analysis was conducted to recommend the deletion of Fremantle Eastern Bypass? The response was: it was a state government decision. I reiterated the question: what analysis? The response: it was a state government decision. In other words, politics writ large and no analysis. Since the deletion of Fremantle Eastern Bypass in 2004 from the metropolitan road scheme, Leach Highway has become the default Perth Freight Link. The only planning the member for Perth did while she was state minister for planning was on how to buy more votes from greenies from the loony left.

The case for the Perth Freight Link is strong. The most significant of the many reasons is the effect the Perth Freight Link will have in terms of community and road user safety. One of the statistics from the City of Melville's document Roe 8 Melville's position: the facts states that for crash rates on urban routes involving trucks—now this is significant—the metropolitan average is 5.4 per cent. So, 5.4 per cent of crashes with road users involved trucks. On Leach Highway, it is 11.1 per cent, and on Kwinana Freeway and Roe Highway—that spaghetti junction that the former minister and now member for Perth deliberately designed as a truncation which was going to cause problems—it is a staggering 31 per cent.

In Western Australia, the Liberal federal government is investing $4.7 billion over five years to build the roads of the 21st century. The extension of Roe Highway is something that I have campaigned long and hard on in the past. This project is tremendously popular and important in my electorate of Tangney. The freight link will remove 500 trucks a day from Leach Highway by 2031, bypass 14 sets of traffic lights, improve access to the Murdoch activity centre and the Fiona Stanley Hospital and create 2,400 jobs.

With specific reference to the member's motion, I note that Fremantle's harbour is forecast, in the next decade, to double to 1.2 million containers per annum. About 20 per cent of Western Australia's economy is linked to trade going in and out of Fremantle. Heavy vehicles and other road freight transport account for around 22 per cent of traffic on key access routes to the Fremantle port inner harbour. This corridor turns over some $16 billion and employs 15,000 people and will double in the next five years. Both the export and import volumes through Fremantle port will continue to grow for years to come. More trade, in particular more exports from WA, means more growth, more jobs and more opportunity for people in WA to get ahead. Without the Perth Freight Link as a productivity-enhancing piece of strategic road infrastructure, this worsening congestion will increasingly act as a handbrake on our economy.

Some people have suggested the Perth Freight Link will not be necessary once we build the second port further south. This is just wrong. Even when a second port is eventually built, it will complement, not replace, Fremantle port. Also, the Perth Freight Link will contribute to more efficient freight movements not just to Fremantle port but to any future second port as well. Indeed, the long-overdue Roe Highway extension will also service any outer harbour in the future.

Today, the member for Perth is campaigning against the strategic road infrastructure in the same way that she campaigned against the construction of Northbridge Tunnel and Graham Farmer Freeway about 15 years ago. In the same way that she was not able to stop the Northbridge Tunnel, which today is used by more than 100,000 cars per day, she will not be able to stand in the way of the Perth Freight Link project.

Ms MacTiernan interjecting—

It is the same sad old story and the same member for Perth screaming out because she does not have any answers.

Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was glad to second this motion. I thank my colleague the member for Perth and shadow parliamentary secretary for Western Australia for providing this opportunity to debate an issue that defines the wastefulness and environmental ignorance and locked-in-the-past approach of the Abbott government. It also exemplifies the complacency and hubris of the coalition when it comes to Western Australia. There can be no doubt that the Abbott and Barnett governments take WA for granted. How else but through complacency and hubris would we see a proposition to spend $2 billion on a road that the WA government never asked for—a road that flies in the face of 20 years of bipartisan port and freight planning around the creation of container capacity in the outer harbour; a road that utterly abandons the opportunity to get significantly more freight on rail; a road that goes nowhere; and a road that ignores the clear evidence of unacceptable harm to environmental and Indigenous heritage values?

As the member for Perth's motion outlines, this is a project that reared up out of nowhere. The transport and logistic bases for the road have clearly been developed after the project was announced, and the belated cost-benefit ratio analysis is highly unconvincing, not least because it does not include analysis of some logical alternatives.

One thing the Perth Freight Link has managed to achieve is a determined and unified community response. In the past few weeks we have seen a number of significant events in which people from both sides of the Swan River have questioned the project's waver-thin justification and its raft of harmful impacts. On 17 August, more than 250 people attended an electors' meeting in the City of Melville that was prompted by widespread disappointment in the lack of scrutiny the council was providing to the project, especially with regard to a number of serious concerns identified by residents. Remember that it was residents in Palmyra and Willagee who, without warning, had received letters suggesting their homes could be subject to compulsory acquisition. The residents and ratepayers expressed their dismay that virtually no account had been taken of the opposition to the destruction of the Beeliar Wetlands, the loss of 500 jobs through the closure of businesses along Stock Road and the impact of diesel particulates throughout the community as a result of a freight transport approach that is sanguine to increasing truck numbers by three or four times. Not surprisingly, a motion was passed at this meeting that called on Melville Council to reverse its unexamined support for Roe 8 and the Perth Freight Link. It should be noted that it was the outcry by residents in Palmyra and Willagee that prompted the WA Minister for Transport to float the possibility that High Street and Stock Road could be cut out of the Perth Freight Link altogether in favour of a tunnel or trench through White Gum Valley in Beaconsfield. This thought bubble has simply inflicted the government's confusion further afield, shifting the alarm onto yet another neighbourhood.

On Sunday, 29 August in the Rally at the Valley, some 300 White Gum Valley residents gathered in a local park to make it clear that they reject this kind of chaotic scattergun planning and the proposal to carve a trench of diesel fumes through residential streets, past schools, and childcare centres. Earlier that week, on 25 August, Premier Barnett attended a North Fremantle community forum in his own electorate, along with transport and urban planning expert, Professor Peter Newman. Premier made a number of interesting statements. He initially claimed that trucks might be forced to use the Perth Freight Link but then backed away from that statement. He also said that Roe 8 would cost less than $500 million, contradicting both his own Treasurer and his Minister for Transport, who, at a joint appearance on 12 August, said Roe 8 would cost $741 million.

On 1 September there was a public forum in Cottesloe which Premier Barnett declined to attend, saying it was too political, at which John Hammond, Peter Newman and Labor opposition leader, Mark McGowan, spoke. Residents expressed their fears that the massive increase in the number of trucks to the inner harbour would inevitably result in substantially more trucks on Curtain Avenue and expressed their disbelief that the WA government was not pushing forward with the long-held plans for the container capacity through the outer harbour.

Finally, on 2 September, a public forum in the town of East Fremantle featured Mayor Jim O'Neill, Cole Hendrigan from Curtin University's Sustainability Policy Institute, and Kate Kelly from Save Beeliar Wetlands. Again, a motion was passed on the basis of overwhelming opposition to both the process and the substance of the Perth Freight Link. At the same time as the Abbott and Barnett governments prepare to spend $2 billion on a truck freeway and private toll road that will ensure rising truck numbers throughout the Perth metro area, there are real congestion problems that go unaddressed in WA. The Barnett government should be only too aware that it has broken a number of promises when it comes to key public transport projects, that freight on rail has dropped steeply on its watch, and that it has failed to advance the development of the outer harbour. That is the tragedy of the Perth Freight Link. Not only is it a dud in itself but also it proposes to waste taxpayers' money that should be applied to infrastructure projects of real merit and urgency, including the Community Connect South project to reduce chronic congestion.

Debate adjourned.