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

This afternoon I would like to talk about what I believe is a terrible mistake my government is making, and it involves what is known as the Moorebank intermodal. I believe that, when history is recorded, this will go down as a classic example of governments picking winners but only ending up picking losers.

By way of background, we must try to work out the most efficient ways to get freight around the city of Sydney. If we look historically, Sydney port was where all of the freight came in. Today, what was down at the container terminal at Sydney port is now Barangaroo, an international tourist attraction. That was from where the freight container handling capacity of Sydney was relocated to Port Botany. The problem that Sydney has had is, as the city has grown, the demographic heart of Sydney has moved further west, so the goods that arrive from overseas in shipping containers have to be transported from Port Botany to further out west. For a lot of the land around the Port Botany area, which was traditionally used as warehousing, the cost has increased so substantially in price that it is now prohibitive for most importers of consumer goods to be located nearby the port. They have had to relocate further out in Western Sydney.

In the past, it would have been a simple matter of the container ship coming in and the containers being lifted off the back of the container, put onto the deck, then lifted up off the deck and put onto the stack. A truck would come in, the container would be taken from the stack to the back of the truck and it would go off to the warehouse. Using an intermodal is actually a form of double handling, because it puts another lift process in the distribution chain. Where the container goes from the port, instead of going on the back of a truck it goes on the back of a train. It then gets taken out to Western Sydney where it then gets lifted off that train, put onto a truck and then taken to the location of where the container needs to go. So, to start with, it is a double handling. For an intermodal concept to actually work, you need to move the container far enough by rail so that you pick up the savings in road versus rail to offset those double handling costs.

This is where Moorebank was a failed idea from the very start. Firstly, anyone looking at this situation about where an intermodal should be located and if one was actually needed—I make the point of whether if one is actually needed is still an issue that has not even been determined by the market—almost a decade ago now a proposal was made to build an intermodal hub at Enfield. This was only about 25 kilometres away from Port Botany, or 25 minutes by road. What happened was that Infrastructure New South Wales—no less an authority than Infrastructure New South Wales—stated that Enfield would provide the test case if short-haul intermodal in Sydney would be commercially viable. The Enfield intermodal is now three years overdue from opening. The operator that was originally going to take it has pulled out. They are no longer prepared to run it because they do not think they can make it commercially viable. This should ring warning bells on the failure of what we do.

It was interesting when we had a meeting here in Parliament House with some of the people from the government bureaucracy, the Department of Infrastructure, who are promoting the Moorebank intermodal. I said to them, 'Enfield is not being accepted by the market. Why then would Moorebank be successful if Enfield is not successful, given that Enfield has been described as the test case?' They said that Enfield did not work because it was too close to Port Botany. This shows how they have it completely wrong. Although the distance from Port Botany to Enfield is closer than the distance from Port Botany to Moorebank as the crow flies, in logistics it is not the distance as the crow flies but the time that you take to travel. Whether by truck or by car, the time that it takes you to get from Port Botany to Enfield as compared to the time it takes you to get from Port Botany to Moorebank, is virtually the same. Anyone can do that test on Google Maps and see that it is virtually the same. Simply, there are no savings—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Proceedings suspended from 17 : 29 to 17 : 34

Going back to what I was saying before the suspension, if we are going to have an intermodal in Sydney even though the test case of Enfield has failed, where should it be? The first thing you would do is look at where the containers are actually going to from Port Botany at the moment. If you do that analysis it is very clear: the area where the most containers are being delivered from Port Botany into Western Sydney is Eastern Creek, which is one of the areas that one of the earlier studies identified as the most suitable location. But somewhere along the line Moorebank came up as a supposedly cheaper option.

I will run through what that the cheaper option is actually going to cost. We have had to relocate the School of Military Engineering. It is wonderful that we have a new School of Military Engineering, but we had an existing school which will be completely bulldozed and demolished. So what value we have added by building that new School of Military Engineering when we already had an existing one is very debatable. For that we spent close to $970 million. That was the first cost. The second cost we have is to clear and rehabilitate the land on the School of Military Engineering site. That is another $100 million cost to the government. Third, if Moorebank were ever going to be successful it would require a major upgrade of all the road networks surrounding it, especially and including an on-ramp onto the M5 and another crossing over the Georges River. This is estimated at costs of upwards of another $750 million. So by the time it is all finished this so-called cheaper option will have cost the taxpayer $2 billion in costs, yet we are getting a second-rate proposal.

Also we have three completely false concepts that this intermodal is built around. The second of these is that it will take trucks off the road. All it actually does is relocate where the trucks depart from. Instead of the trucks departing from Port Botany they will now depart from Moorebank, and Moorebank is an area of more congestion than is already around Port Botany. Moorebank being so far to the south-west of Sydney and not being centrally located will actually result in more trucks and more traffic on roads. A study was done by a company called Transport Modelling where they looked at a typical importer of consumer goods that would distribute those goods to retail shopping centres around New South Wales. They found that if an importer moved down to Moorebank from Eastern Creek, Wetherill Park or the Chullora area it would have its trucks on the road up to 10 per cent more. So by relocating to Moorebank we are putting more trucks on the road.

The other issue of course is air pollution. The argument was that this would reduce air pollution. There is some truth in that—or partial truth. If you are moving goods by rail as compared to road, you use half as much diesel fuel. But the problem is that a train spews out 18 times more particulate matter per litre of diesel fuel burnt than a truck does. That is almost a nine times increase in particulate matter spewed out in Western Sydney. We must remember that the World Health Organization has classified particulate matter as a carcinogen. We already have levels of particulate matter in Western Sydney right on the threshold of the recommended levels of the World Health Organization, so we should be doing everything we can to reduce those levels of particulate matter in Western Sydney. Yet here we are with a proposal that will bring a ninefold increase from every single container moved via rail rather than road. This is a project that needs a serious second look.

Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As we head into December and then towards Christmas, I want to take this time this afternoon to highlight the issues the Australian Public Service is and has been facing under the Turnbull government. Since the election of the government, we have seen them attack a wide variety of Australians including low-income Australians and they have, in many senses, trashed sectors of our economy. For example, it is clear that when the Treasurer, in December 2013, goaded Holden to leave and Holden made the decision to leave, that really had a devastating impact on the car industry and, consequentially, adverse impacts on small and medium enterprises across the automotive parts sector.

This government want to increase the cost of living for every Australian family by broadening and increasing the GST to 15 per cent. They have engaged in a relentless war against job seekers and are asking those people now to live on absolutely nothing for a whole month. Until we defeated the earlier provision, they were seeking a change that would mean that young people would be deprived of any support whatsoever for six months before they could receive any income benefit. At the same time, they were not guaranteeing earning any jobs because, as we know, there are between 50,000 and 60,000 more Australians unemployed today than was the case when this government was elected. They have sought to stitch up families by getting rid of the family tax benefit for more than one million Australians while also cutting childcare assistance to a significant number of families.

When it comes to the Australian Public Service, the government has also continued this attack on job security and indeed on job conditions. The Abbott-Turnbull government's bargaining policy is leading to workers in the public service. You only have to look at what is happening at Border Force or Human Services to show that they are seeking to significantly cut their income. In the case of Border Force, what was put to them for them to support was an annual cut of up to $8,000. These are national security officers being asked to take a pay cut of $8,000. Is it any wonder that the agency chose not to support that and the workforce has been resisting this imposition by this very antiworker government?

Labor acknowledges there have been some agreements struck. In one case recently, this week, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade reached an agreement. However, we strongly believe that the government has an obsession with axing jobs and cutting wages and conditions, which has not lead to a more effective workforce and I do not believe it is in the public interest. What Australia needs is an effective, well-run public service. We believe in public institutions and in the Public Service. We think that under this government, government departments and agencies are being left with nowhere to turn but to cut costs through cutting real wages and working conditions.

It is true to say the economy is in a very parlous state. We have the lowest wage growth in Australia for more than a quarter of a century but that is not a sufficient alibi for the government to use to be so harsh towards its own workforce. I think it is fair to say that you judge a government by the way it treats its own workforce and, indeed, it translates to how they would like to see businesses treat workers across the entire nation. Look at the government as an employer and you get a reasonable picture as to the way they would like things to be done.

We have had industrial action being taken across the country in response to this ideological assault by the Turnbull government. The Australian Public Service workers do not take the decision to strike lightly. These workers, as I said, in some cases are facing losses of up to $8,000. They also suffer the consequences of being stood down by taking this action, so they take a real risk, but are left with very few choices. It is not like Border Force officers want passengers to battle through queues to get their flights or Human Services workers want job seekers and people struggling to make ends meet to have to wait for support and be served at Centrelink offices and the like. They are taking this last resort, industrial action, for a reason, and I would contend it is because of this government's obsession with going after the Public Service at all costs.

The irony of course of the government's claims that it is slashing jobs, pay and conditions in the public service to cut costs should not be lost on anyone though. Just this weekend it was revealed that the money the Abbott and Turnbull governments is saving from job cuts has been cancelled-out by a massive increase in the costs of high-paid consultants and contractors. By way of contrast, last year the Commonwealth departments reduced wages, they say, by $109 million thanks to the sacking of thousands of public sector workers; however, the consultancy and contract costs have increased by $205 million—almost double the savings that were allegedly made by the government. You have to wonder how much influence the consultant firms and contractors have over the government's policy decisions.

I contend that the public service is more than capable of providing impartial, independent, robust advice, but not if the government continues to cut wages under the guise of cost-savings, and cut conditions to make people work longer and harder. As I said, you can tell a lot about this government by the way it treats its own workforce. It is not just me that thinks that; the former Secretary of the Treasury, Mr Ken Henry, has said the same about the resources that have been taken from the public sector. It has had a huge impact on advice and the effectiveness of governments to efficiently undertake the obligations they have to the people of Australia.

But Labor understands that successful employers know better. They understand that a business that employs good staff and has strong relationships built on trust works better. Strengthening workplace conditions does not appear to be the government's strong point but it is a very significant issue. That is why Labor has announced that it will provide, among other things, for five days paid domestic and family violence leave in the national employment standards.

We are still awaiting a response. I pay tribute to the Prime Minister for not responding adversely to that suggestion. Indeed, he has said that he is examining that option—as has the Minister for Social Services. Less supportive was the Assistant Treasurer. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister has said that he will examine that. We would ask him to consider it because, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, one in six Australian women have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former partner. The trauma of domestic and family violence is often compounded by workplace and financial uncertainty.

Domestic and family violence leave will benefit those who have experienced violence and businesses, through improved productivity, increased employee retention and reduced absenteeism. Consider the time required in courts, in meetings with lawyers, financial advisers, school principals and in counselling sessions for people who have experienced violence, which is required in the pursuit of safety and justice.

We want to acknowledge the very good employers who have been working proactively in this area: Telstra, National Australia Bank, Virgin Australia, Ikea and Blundstone. We would like to thank the union movement, which, on behalf of many workers, have been campaigning for this very significant issue. This can save hundreds of millions of dollars for employers and billions of dollars for our economy. So, it is not only the right thing to do; it is also an economically sound thing to do. I ask the government to seriously consider the option of supporting Labor's position with respect to a minimum of five days paid leave for such important circumstances, which none of us would want to see any woman confront.

Finally, on a separate matter, I am advised that members of the Korean public service and transport workers union have been arrested during legitimate protests in relation to union recognition and safe and decent conditions. Labor firmly believes employees have a fundamental, democratic right to representation in the workplace, to freedom of association, to bargain collectively, to organise and to be represented by their union.

Labor also believes workplace injuries are most often preventable. Industries, employers, trade unions and workers should be supported to reduce workplace risks, hazards and injuries and to achieve the highest possible standards of workplace safety. On the advice I have receive, I have concerns about the treatment of these workers in Korea. I question the arrests and I respectfully encourage the Korean authorities to further examine the basis of this decision and to take steps to release those innocent of any criminal conduct.