Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It pains me to have to stand in this place and raise this issue once again, but, on behalf of my constituents, I will. I take the time to raise an important infrastructure issue in my local community around a walking path in Millswood which was closed several years ago. Ever since, the local residents and I, as their representative, have been fighting to have it reopened. I went through the history of this issue and see that this has involved speaking to Warren Truss when he was the minister and speaking to the member for Gippsland when he was the minister, and now I call on the Deputy Prime Minister, who may be looking for an issue that he can get himself involved in and fix. I would recommend that the Millswood walking path is just that issue.

This is an example of where government has been completely out of touch with the needs of our local community. There is a walking path alongside the freight line in Millswood. It was deemed to be unsafe, so the walking path was closed way back in 2015. In 2015, it was deemed unsafe. Since then, residents have been turning to the state government, pleading with them to upgrade the walking path and reopen it. The state government have said that they can't do anything because the freight line is overseen by the federal government, so they need the federal government to undertake a safety audit. The federal government have said, 'This is not our responsibility. We don't control walking paths, so go and speak to the state government.' Local residents have been left scratching their heads and wondering why no level of government can undertake the simplest infrastructure upgrade to improve the lives of these local residents.

I had the opportunity to take the shadow minister, the member for Grayndler, to the site of this walking path. When he looked at it, he said, 'This is simple to fix. This could be fixed with a phone call. All you need is for the minister to instruct the ARTC to undertake a safety audit and that safety audit would say that you could open the walking path if there were a new fence.' It should not be beyond this parliament to supply one safety audit so that we can get a new fence in place and finally reopen this walking track, but it's taken countless letters to ministers and countless speeches in this parliament, and now the Deputy Prime Minister is so busy and so side-tracked with other things. Let him prove that he is focused on the issues affecting Australians. Let him pick up the phone, call the ARTC and say, 'We need you to undertake a safety audit.' That is all we're asking in this regard.

Following the last letter to the government, we got a response saying, 'It would be a bit too expensive to do a safety audit.' We heard just this week how much underspend is in the federal government's infrastructure budget. Nobody thinks that a safety audit is going to be particularly expensive, and we all expect that the safety audit will say, 'If you build a fence that will maybe cost $20,000, you'll be able to fix this issue.' For crying out loud, the federal parliament should be able to undertake the safety audit so that we can build a new fence and reopen this walking track once and for all.

I stand here and continue to fight for this. I regard myself as being quite successful in lobbying for funding for projects in my electorate, but I can't conduct a safety audit. The state government have been lobbied. I note that the Labor candidate for Badcoe, Jayne Stinson, is furiously lobbying on behalf of the local community. She's also very successful. She's already secured $2½ million for new sports club rooms at Goodwood Oval, she's found a new home for the Puddle Jumpers children's charity and she's helped the Forestville Hockey Club to move to a new $9 million sports hub, but she can't conduct a safety audit either. The only people who can ensure that the safety audit is undertaken are the federal government. We need the federal minister to pick up the phone and ring the ARTC, and, once the safety audit has been conducted, we can take care of the rest.

This is about the government showing that, so far, they've just been too pre-occupied and too busy chasing headlines to focus on the small issues which are never going to lead the headline news, but they are impacting on people's lives each and every day. The residents in Millswood deserve to have a minister in charge of infrastructure—a minister in charge of the ARTC who can act on this important issue, pick up the phone and just request a safety audit. As the local member, I will take care of the rest. (Time expired)