Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the minister for that response. I acknowledge that the minister has said you cannot do everything in one package, but it is the position of the Greens that one of the areas of desperate need in infrastructure is the upgrade of public transport from one end of the country to the other. The collapse of the public transport system in Victoria, particularly in Melbourne, in January was a classic case of desperate need. It is the same in Sydney. We need to spend billions in Australia in upgrading public transport. But I also acknowledge that the issue in many rural and regional areas of Australia is that there is no public transport at all.

The north-west coast of Tasmania is, as the minister has said, an area of chronic need. No doubt this government will consider future infrastructure spends, separate from this package, as we go down the line but I hope that public transport comes to the fore as something that is a very high priority. I am fully aware of the Infrastructure Australia process that is going on at the moment and I know that bids have gone into Infrastructure Australia. I am not privy, obviously, to what is being considered by Infrastructure Australia but I know that there is huge support in the community for a big spend on public transport infrastructure as soon as it is feasible or possible for the government to move on this. Again, this is in the context of peak oil.

The other issue for rural and regional areas of the north-west coast of Tasmania, as I have argued to successive governments, is the need for a light rail system to connect Latrobe with Smithton. It would make a huge difference to north-west Tasmania to link all those towns, and it would lead, hopefully, to an end to the duplication that goes on there. You have there a situation where an elderly person living in Devonport cannot visit a friend who happens to be in hospital in Burnie unless they drive, which is not feasible particularly for some of the frail aged—and we have a substantial ageing population in north-west Tasmania, as we do everywhere else. And there is the issue of students being able to travel from TAFE in Burnie to their homes in Devonport or vice versa. There are also people wanting to visit or patients wanting to access doctors or various services.

We could have a much better range of services and much less duplication on the north-west coast if we had all of the north-west coast linked with a public transport system. I have had this conversation with the Cradle Coast Authority—I have had it in Tasmania for years. I have a view about light rail. Others have a view that it should be a public bus service that goes along the coast. But either way, a commitment to a public transport network linking the coastal towns from Smithton to Latrobe is something that I would like to see in a future infrastructure package.

As the minister has said in relation to infrastructure, whilst we can see roads and rail and so on are important, one of the essential parts of infrastructure in the country, which I hope the government might consider in a future package, is the electricity grid around the country, which needs to be upgraded to an intelligent grid. It would have been an ideal opportunity in this package to link the government’s mandatory renewable energy target with the Greens feed-in tariff legislation and invest in the infrastructure of the grid to turn it into an intelligent grid. If you had all those three things you would have a massive stimulus to jobs and investment in the renewable energy sector because you would get people going out and buying solar panels and putting in wind systems—through from small- to large-scale infrastructure. Because they would have a set period of time for the payback they would be able to invest in that. You would get long-term investment horizons, massive investment, rollout of jobs in those technologies and so on.

So I am rather concerned, with this package, that the government has not seen the opportunity, under the whole carbon pollution reduction agenda, to link the mandatory renewable energy target with an investment in an intelligent grid around the country. As it stands, if we got a massive rollout of renewable energy we would not have a grid capable of bringing on some of those energy sources. If you had a large solar thermal station in outback New South Wales somewhere, or you had a large solar array, wind farm or whatever, the grid would not be capable of bringing on that source at the time it was needed, or be capable of linking energy efficiency measures with new systems coming on and so on.

So I think one of the major infrastructure needs in Australia, apart from the skeleton of public transport network around the country, is the desperate need for an upgrade of the electricity grid to an intelligent grid so that we can bring on the renewable energy revolution that most people see as a massive jobs creator, a rebuilder of the manufacturing sector and a great opportunity for Australia.

While we are on the subject of infrastructure, I totally support the spend on schools in Australia. It has long been needed, and it will be a delight to me to see new infrastructure in schools across the country because it has been neglected for years. The fact that we can make them more energy efficient is welcome because it will be more comfortable for the students and it will be cheaper for the schools to run. It also stimulates all the businesses associated with efficiency. (Time expired)