Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This report into the operation of toll roads in Australia was incredibly illuminating as to what's really going on with transport planning across the country. It was very clear from the evidence presented to the committee that things are not operating as they should. Many very significant transport decisions are being made in the interests of private toll operators rather than in the interests of developing a transport system for our cities which meets all of the other objectives: environmental objectives, social objectives, objectives of reducing congestion in our cities, and objectives of reducing pollution in our cities. It was very clear from the evidence presented to the committee that we are in a situation where much of the large-scale motorway and freeway development that's occurring is in the interests of one company—Transurban—which now operates 13 of the 16 toll roads operating across the country and essentially has a monopoly. Very significant evidence was presented to the committee that showed that it's a massive problem.

Given all the problems that you have when one large company is basically the sole provider of toll road operations, decisions aren't being made in the public interest. This is particularly the case when many of the decisions about whether to go ahead with toll roads are made in ways in which the information isn't available to the community to assess. There are huge problems with transparency and huge problems with information. Decisions are being made on the basis of information which is commercial-in-confidence and that information is not able to be shared openly with the public. That might be acceptable if you have a government process that determines that there is a need for a major new road and then invites tenders to bid for that road, but we have a further development which undermines the transparent and accountable planning processes when we have market-led proposals, such as in the case of the West Gate Tunnel, which is currently being planned for Melbourne. Transurban went to the Victorian government and said, 'Here is a proposal for a tollway.' From the evidence presented, it certainly looks like a very good proposal for Transurban shareholders, but, in terms of assessing whether it meets the needs of the community and whether it's value for money for the community, a lot of the information is still commercial-in-confidence.

We heard evidence from Mr William McDougall, who was a very senior transport planner who did considerable work with the Victorian government. He was involved with part of the independent peer review of the West Gate Tunnel. He had very serious concerns with some of the transport modelling and the economic modelling—whether it was accurate; whether it was information that could be relied upon. He raised his concerns with the Victorian government and, rather than those concerns being taken into account and properly addressed, he was removed from the team that were working on the West Gate Tunnel. He presented evidence to us because it was an opportunity for him to share with the community the sorts of things that were going on behind closed doors.

The independent peer review of the West Gate Tunnel that he contributed to has still not been made public. The Victorian government has happily shared with the community other independent peer reviews of transport projects, such as the Melbourne Metro Rail tunnel, but not the independent peer review of the West Gate Tunnel. Given the criticism by Mr McDougall, a senior and very experienced transport planner, you can only ask, 'What have they got to hide?' This really strikes at the heart of what the problems are with transport planning in our cities today. Far too much information assessing whether a project is appropriate or not is not available to the public.

Of course, the Commonwealth is directly involved because it is Commonwealth funding that is going into many of these road projects. There are billions of dollars going into the WestConnex road in Sydney. That project has a similar lack of transparency and accountability. We do not know whether these roads are value for money. In fact, all the evidence that can be dug out shows that they are not, that they will not solve the transport problems they're setting out to address and that they are going to be adding to congestion and pollution in our cities. Our cities are heading into a situation where they will be jammed with traffic. These projects are not tackling the very congestion problems that they are setting out to address.

The recommendations from our report outline some things that could be done about this. The first and most important one is that plans for major road projects like this only move forward when they are done in the context of an overall, integrated and holistic transport plan for a region. We should not be assessing projects one by one on a project-by-project basis. The recommendation of the committee was that Infrastructure Australia take a system wide, mode-neutral approach in its consideration of any project and consider alternative ways of solving the problem being addressed.

The additional comments from the Greens go further than that and say that we should not be putting billions of dollars of Commonwealth money into individual projects unless they have been planned in the context of a fully integrated, holistic transport plan for a region and there has been very strong community involvement in the development of that transport plan. That way we can make sure that these very large, very significant bits of infrastructure really are meeting the needs of the community, really are creating cities that are healthier and more sustainable, really are seriously addressing the issues of congestion and really are creating healthy, vibrant cities. On these large road projects the major beneficiaries are the shareholders of the companies, particularly Transurban, who are operating them.

Tolls was another major area the committee heard evidence about. It heard about the tolls that are in place for these roads, what happens when people don't pay their tolls and the fines that are being issued, particularly in Victoria and Queensland. People on low incomes living in the outer suburbs often have no other option but to drive on these toll roads—the public transport options just aren't there for them. They are having to pay very substantial tolls on a week-by-week basis just to get to work. What happens if they find themselves not able to pay those tolls? We heard evidence of people racking up tens of thousands of dollars in toll fines when they did not pay a fine for an essential journey to or from work. A very large proportion of the time of the Magistrates Court in Victoria, in particular, is now being filled by people contesting their toll fines.

This is a really, really warped way of managing our society, where we have people who are very vulnerable, with low-incomes, not able to pay these massive fines—and why should they be paying these massive fines anyway?—clogging up the court system. These courts should be considering much more significant things, but this is where our current operation of toll roads has left us. We've certainly made some recommendations about how this way of managing the imposition of tolls and then managing the fines needs to be seriously reconsidered in order to not have these really deleterious impacts on some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

In conclusion, this report really lays out a very good body of evidence of how the current direction that we are heading with the planning of our roads and our transport networks across our cities really needs to change. We need to have much more integrated, holistic planning to ensure that the social and environmental benefits and the benefits of tackling climate change are really taken into account in our planning, so that we end up with transport systems that really serve our communities in the best way possible. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.