Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There has been a lot of talk about the Greater Adelaide Freight Bypass in South Australia. The freight bypass would take heavy vehicles off South Eastern Freeway, around the back of the hills and onto the Northern Expressway. The aim is to get unnecessary heavy vehicles off Cross Road in Boothby and Portrush Road in Sturt.

At the 2018 South Australian election, which was won by the Liberal Party, they campaigned that they would build the bypass, which they called Globelink. But less than two years later the then Liberal premier Steven Marshall cancelled Globelink. They then said they would still do a road version but all they planned was a bypass around the rural town of Truro. They tried to say this was their major freight bypass, but their plans showed one lane each way, and it didn't join up to the freeway or the expressway—one lane each way for a major freight bypass. But they were not averse to building extra lanes, because, at the time they were allegedly planning the totally inadequate Truro bypass, they put $61 million of federal funding into widening an intersection on Cross Road in Boothby and $98 million of federal funding into widening an intersection on Portrush Road in Sturt. Both of these intersections—on roads that we're trying to get the freight traffic off—mysteriously have extra lanes around the intersections. These lanes, however, disappear a couple of hundred metres from the intersection, where you suddenly have a bottleneck, as traffic has to merge back into the more narrow road. It seems odd, yes?

Well, last week we found out what this was about. The Liberal tenders required the intersections to be upgraded to freight standard. So, while they were still pretending they were doing a one-lane freight bypass at Truro, they were, in reality, funding massive upgrades of Cross Road and Portrush Road to freight standards. But it gets worse. We now find out that the Liberals had a report done on what it would cost to further progress their sneaky Cross Road freight route. They worked out how much it would cost to purchase up to 188 homes and businesses that they would need to compulsorily acquire.

I can advise that the South Australian Labor Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, Tom Koutsantonis, absolutely ruled out a freight route on Cross Road and Portrush Road prior to the 2022 state election and has now submitted a business case to Infrastructure Australia for the entire freight bypass with two lanes each way, so the residents of Boothby and Sturt can rest assured. At the 2022 election in Boothby, there were differences of opinion and policy, but no-one actually lied about the position of their opponents. Sadly, this has not been the case for the Liberals in Boothby this time, and the election hasn't even been called. It just goes to show you can't believe anything the Liberals say; you have to look at what they do.