Stephen Parry (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I inform the Senate that at 8.30 am today Senators Siewert and Leyonhjelm each submitted a letter in accordance with standing order 75 proposing a matter of public importance. The question of which proposal would be submitted to the Senate was determined by lot. As a result, I inform the Senate that the following letter has been received from Senator Siewert.

Dear Mr President

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

The chaos, lack of transparency and waste surrounding the Abbott-Turnbull Government's outdated urban freeway projects including the Perth Freight Link, East West Link, and WestConnex.

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

I understand that informal arrangements have been made in relation to today's debate to allocate specific times to the speakers. With the concurrence of the Senate, I ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to make a contribution on what is now termed the Perth Freight Link, but I think there is a little bit of a history lesson that would not hurt those listening in. Perth's major port is the port of Fremantle, and it is no secret, Australia being an island nation, that there are hundreds of thousands of containers that come through the Fremantle port each year. Our major warehousing and distribution centre is the area of Kewdale and Welshpool. We also have up there our international airport, and we also have our domestic airport. Over the years since the Howard government, the domestic airport is now also a major warehousing facility.

For years we have had a patchwork system in our state where we have chucked in traffic lights every time a footpath crosses a road. We used to have this road called High Street when I was a young fellow living in Fremantle, before I moved out to Perth's eastern suburbs, to a place called Langford. Let me tell the eastern staters: when you move out to Perth's eastern suburbs, you are not progressing up the social ladder, I can tell you. It was always going to be the freight link, so to speak, between the port, our warehousing and distribution centres, and our major transport centres. This also is the doorway, as Senator Back and other colleagues from WA would know, to the resource-rich north-west. This major freight corridor has, over the years, carted millions and millions and millions of tonnes between Perth, the port, Kewdale and Welshpool and through to our northern areas, the Pilbara and the Kimberley. I spent 12 of my years running freight up and down that link.

But over the years it has just got ridiculous, and the Leach Highway is probably one of the worst highways in this country. I have said this on a number of occasions: whoever thought whacking traffic lights onto the Leach Highway and having two lanes each way over the Shelley Bridge, being four lanes—well, they actually merge, three into two—was a good idea, and whoever thought we had to have bus lanes running off and that it was a fantastic idea to bring in B-doubles and pocket road trains climbing Stock Road Hill, with up to 68 tonnes of freight, and to integrate general traffic, cars and people taking their kids to school, seriously should have been taken out the back and whacked around the ears.

So what we have got is an absolute disaster, but it has got even worse because successive governments over the years have done a lot of talking about how we are going to combat or face or approach our transport task doubling by 2020. In my previous life, it was not a secret. We all knew—those of us who were in the transport game all knew—our freight task was going to double, but no-one had the nous to think, 'Hang on, we'd better do something.' There is also live export out of our port of Fremantle. Just about everything comes in and out of Fremantle except fuel and fertiliser. Our port will be at capacity in somewhere between eight and 12 years—there are a few different figures around—but we still have this goat track called the Leach Highway. We need another port, and there is no secret. I do not think there is a Western Australian who would argue. We have to have the outer harbour. The outer harbour would be down at Kwinana, some 25 or 30 kays south of Perth, south of Fremantle, and we need a freight route to get to it.

We actually have to face facts: freight has to move. We cannot just put it in bloody balloons and float it around the suburbs. And do not worry, Mr Acting Deputy President; I actually saw something. Someone went to Germany to see some proposal about how you could airlift freight in balloons so you were not clogging roads. This is the mentality of some of the people we have had in Western Australia.

But what has made it worse? No-one has done a damn thing. We found out back in about 2014, not long after the election of the Abbott government. An announcement came out, with a freshly minted government and some freshly minted ministers, that the Perth Freight Link would be built. Those of us who have been around for a long time knew what the eastern bypass was, and we know the history behind the Fremantle eastern bypass and why it did not go ahead. We know that. So we had to find out: what was this Perth Freight Link? It was, in a nutshell—others will add to this—to upgrade that freight route I was talking about, the Leach Highway, that disastrous piece of infrastructure, to turn it into a major truck route. I do not know where all the cars are going to go, but they will probably stay on the Leach Highway, and that is their penalty. It also would be a toll road—and we were told we would never have toll roads. But it is a number of stages, Roe 8 and 9.

What it virtually boiled down to was that the federal government had a photo opportunity. I think there was newly minted Minister Cormann, as a senior Western Australian member of the government, and I think Minister Johnston was there as well. I think Assistant Minister Briggs was there announcing that just under a billion federal dollars was going to be spent in Western Australia doing up this freight route, and the state government—which really looked like the rabbit in the spotlight—would have to find the other $600 million, $700 million or whatever it was. To cut a long story short, it was going to be a $1.6 billion upgrade to move freight along.

So, bearing in mind that the government in Perth has lost its AAA credit rating, we also have the Perth-Darwin highway, which I have been absolutely 100 per cent behind from day one. That is a vital piece of infrastructure that we need. Plus there have been a few announcements in the last couple of elections about a Forrestfield rail line, but unfortunately the government over there says a lot of things during elections and then finds more excuses than a pregnant nun for why it cannot do it. I might withdraw that. This does wind me up. I withdraw that.

Chris Ketter (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Sterle.

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We did the inquiry. We went to Fremantle, and there were a number of us at the inquiry. We wanted to hear from people. We invited everyone. We invited those who were pro the freight link and those who were opposed to the freight link. Sadly, the main players, who are all for it, did not even turn up. They did not want to come and front the committee and tell the people why we need to move freight safely. We need to integrate the movement of freight and separate it from public transport.

We have now got to what we do know. There is now a $1.6 billion project. If you know Perth, you know we have a river just before the port. When we leave the Leach Highway at Kewdale or Welshpool, just before we get to the port we have a river, and we have to get across the river. This grand plan, which has now blown out to about $2.2 billion, stops about 50 metres before the river. I do not know what we are going to do there, because the existing bridge—for those of us who have the displeasure sometimes of having to drive over it—is a nightmare, and for heavy vehicles that is the only way they can get over to the port and back to Kewdale and Welshpool and over to other areas like Spearwood and so on.

But in the state government now—it is very public—the Premier, Mr Barnett, is bluing with his minister, Mr Nalder. They have conflicting time lines. We have now found out that the Premier has said, 'Well, we're not going to build Roe all the way.' We now read in TheWest Australian, that fantastic organ that we have over there, that the first stage will be built; for the rest, we do not even know what is going to happen there. We do not know when that is going to happen, because the Premier is now playing a game with his federal counterparts that he does not want to spend that money doing up the last stage—before we even talk about getting a bridge and upgrading the rail bridge across the river too—because he has other things he wants to build.

As a Western Australian, there are a number of things I have to say in a short time. I want freight to move. I was calling for a freight route 20 years ago, and I was ignored. I called for a freight route 10 years ago, and I was ignored. What would I know? But now, all of a sudden, when we really are at the pointy end, no-one knows what the heck we are doing. There are conversations about the tunnel. We have heard that; we picked that up in our inquiry. But we do not know where the tunnel will start, if there will be a tunnel. Infrastructure Australia told us that they did the costings on it. They did the work on it, but there was no inclusion of a tunnel. So it went from $1.6 billion to $2.2 billion and it stops 50 metres before the river, before we talk about another couple of bridges. It is just absolutely shambolic.

I heard Mr Ian King—he heads up the Western Australian Road Transport Association—on talkback radio in Perth a couple of weeks ago going absolutely berserk because even those who are part and parcel of the transport minister's forums and workshops and all that do not even know what is going on, and they are the ones who are responsible for representing the trucking industry. We have a lot of residents who live along the Leach Highway high street. Unfortunately, their homes are marked for destruction. We heard from people there.

There is an issue that I will not comment on. I will leave that to the Greens. They can have this argument about some wetland stuff. That is what they will do, and I am not surprised. It is next to my suburb. I will probably wander past on my morning walk and find Senator Ludlam chained to a bulldozer or something. That will not surprise me.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tell us what you really think!

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will not be chained to the bulldozer, but it is just an absolute shambles. We are supposed to be the smart nation. We need to move freight in Western Australia, and successive governments have all put their heads in the sand.

Now I want to conclude with this because I do not have enough time to really tell you what I am thinking. I made a bet with Senator Johnston when he was the minister at the table in his very first round of estimates as the minister. I bet him in front of everyone—it is on Hansarda $2 scratchie that this road will not be built. So, Senator Johnston, in my last five seconds I have remembered, and you are going to owe me a $2 scratchie.

Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am delighted to rise to speak to this issue associated with the Perth Freight Link. I remind those listening that the coalition government has made a historic infrastructure investment commitment of some $50 billion to get on with building infrastructure that this nation so badly needs. In fact, it is the largest expenditure in our history. But in the context of Western Australia it is the Perth Freight Link project along with others like the NorthLink Perth-Darwin highway that Senator Sterle just spoke of, the Gateway WA project around the airport, the Forrest Highway in its time and now the commitment to Armadale Road. But it is the Perth Freight Link project for which the federal government has committed some $925 million towards construction. It is two stages at the moment and there will be a third. The first is the extension of Roe Highway in what is known as Roe 8. The extension beyond that is to the western side of the Swan River and then eventually will be the continuation, and that will be a doubling of the Stirling Bridge and approaches to it.

I then ask: where is the problem and why the issue? We know that congestion is crippling our city. We know, for example, that container traffic through the Port of Fremantle has gone up some 70 per cent from 2003-04 to 2013-14. Now some 700,000 boxes or 20-foot sea containers per year are destined to go towards 1.2 million. Senator Sterle quite correctly has drawn attention to the problems associated with Leach Highway, and I am going to confirm in my contribution that he has been talking about this for at least some 10 years when I draw attention to some comments he made.

But why have we got a problem? Because, contrary to what Senator Sterle said—that there was never a plan—of course there was always the Stephenson-Hepburn plan from 1955. The Stephenson-Hepburn plan included what is planned to be Roe 8 and an area known as the Fremantle Eastern Bypass, and that is where it all went wrong. The reason is the then minister, a Ms MacTiernan, now the federal member for Perth, protecting the political future of Mr Jim McGinty, the then Labor member for Fremantle, decided with him in her wisdom that they would actually delete the Fremantle Eastern Bypass and have it rezoned to residential. And this is why we are in this problem today. The government of the day made 17 million lousy dollars out of that exercise and, had that whole project been completed at that time, the estimates of cost are around about $220 million to $250 million in total. Instead, now we are looking at about $1.3 billion.

What did people at the time say? I am quoting now from the Hon. Simon O'Brien, still in the legislative council, from 7 April 2004. He was making reference to comments made by a TWU representative who we all now know is our good friend Senator Glenn Sterle. This is what he said, in part, on the idea of removing the Fremantle Eastern Bypass:

… this will create a frightening congestion problem of mammoth proportions in the very near future on all highways and major roads leading to the docks.

This was somebody of the same political persuasion as he. Mr Sterle said:

Even now Leach Highway, which carries most trucking to and from the port, is battling to handle the heavy freight …

That was in 2004, and of course we now have the horrific situation of Leach Highway. But it is even more interesting that his then colleague and, I guess, boss, Mr Jim McGiveron from the Transport Workers Union, made the comment about congestion killing, and of Ms MacTiernan, the then minister, he said:

Congestion kills our People; stuffs up our Environment, and it will destroy our Economy.

Yet Alannah in Wonderland is too busy playing choo choos with all our "Monopoly Money" to do anything about the impending traffic crisis.

He said she needed to spend a week in a truck driving backwards and forwards on Leach Highway to work out the gridlock situation that exists. I cannot actually use the words that Mr McGiveron used about Ms MacTiernan, because it would be un-parliamentary, but, if I was referred to the north end of a south travelling fat rat, I think you would get some sense of the words that Mr McGiveron was using in relation to whether or not Ms MacTiernan gave any care or consideration to truck drivers. He said, 'She didn't understand us and never recognises the vital role we play.'

So it is good to see Senator Sterle in this place today in fact confirming what we always knew, and that was that this Roe 8 has to be constructed, that Leach Highway was never designed—and for all the reasons Senator Sterle, with his depth of knowledge in the trucking industry, the number of sets of lights et cetera and the mixture of heavy vehicles and light vehicles. There are some hundreds of houses along Leach Highway that face straight onto and try to drive onto Leach Highway. It is predicted that we will see a 75 per cent increase in heavy vehicle traffic by 2021, rising to 110 per cent by 2031.

Something has to be done. Leach Highway is already carrying more than one and a half times the average metropolitan road traffic. There is already a rate of doubling of heavy vehicle accidents and incidents on that particular road. Something has to be done. We went into government at the state level back in 2008, when I was a candidate for the seat of Alfred Cove and unsuccessful—which, of course, allowed me to be able to then put myself forward as a candidate when then Senator Chris Ellison resigned. I very often thank both the Greens political party and the Labor Party for preferencing some 95 per cent against me in the seat of Alfred Cove, which has landed me where I am today.

But the simple fact of the matter is that there never has been any doubt that this was going to go ahead. I quote from an article in The West Australian newspaper from 12 November from a Mr Martin Stewart, a resident of the suburb of Willetton, in the approaches to Roe 8, where he and his wife bought in in 1985. In it he says, 'When my wife and I bought our land, clearly marked on the map was the route of the Roe Highway. We duly noted it. We bought our land anyhow within 300 metres of the proposed highway. As part of your approval process why don't you just get on with it?'

I want to lend my name and my voice to the fact that we will definitely have to have an outer harbour in the Kwinana area at some time into the future. It is disappointing to all Western Australians, in my view, that planning has not already started for the outer harbour. We are going to need the outer harbour, there is no question; and I would urge state and federal governments to get on with that planning process.

It is my understanding that back in the 1890s when Charles Yelverton O'Connor was brought from New Zealand to the colony of Western Australia by Sir John Forrest, amongst others, as the chief engineer to build a new harbour, O'Connor said to Forrest that the place they needed to build it is where we are contemplating the outer harbour. So there are no arguments about that.

There are two points to be made. Firstly, we know very well that even if we started the planning process today it would be 10 or 15 years before an outer harbour would be ready to be used. Secondly, we know that the inner harbour will always be used for container and related freight services. We know that the inner harbour will go up to maybe a million boxes rather than 1.2, but we know there will always be that demand.

Senator Reynolds, who is sitting beside me, participated in the Senate hearing in Fremantle recently, along with Senator Ludlam, Senator Bullock and Senator Sterle, as I recall. It is disappointing to me that the community were not given a better and wider brief of the next phase, and that is the phase beyond Roe 8 up to the approaches of the Stirling bridge. The point that I made into the Hansard, answered by the relevant federal department person who was in Perth, was that contrary to the fears and expectations of the doomsayers and others, the actual extension of this road will have a heavy vehicle trench and residential traffic will not be on the road in competition with heavy traffic through that area. It is grossly disappointing that one of the witnesses who appeared before us was terribly upset by the fact that her home, along with others along High Road and Leach Highway, will be lost as part of this process. It was not appropriate for me to say to her, 'Your problem rests with Ms MacTiernan back in the period before 2002-04 when this problem should have been addressed by the Stephenson-Hepburn plan of 1955.

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

In every single major Australian city, people are stuck in their cars. It is making us late for appointments, costing us at the petrol pump and reducing the time we can spend at home with our friends and families. For decades, the response from state and federal governments has been to plough billions into bigger motorways, extra lanes and ever-more complex spaghetti junctions. This has achieved as much as loosening our belts to reduce obesity.

The initial sigh of relief is always short lived. From the Monash Freeway in Melbourne to the Mitchell Freeway in Perth to the M4 in Sydney, no matter how much a road is expanded it inevitably clogs up. And with 18 million motor vehicles registered in Australia, there are no more notches left on our motorway belt. We have hit peak road. Something has got to give. It is simply not efficient to build more tollways. They drain government coffers and destroy communities.

The signs are there for all to see. The sooner we accept it, the easier it is going to be for everyone. You just have to look at the failure of the East West toll road in Melbourne. This was a project that was going to rip through homes and parklands at a cost of $1 billion for every kilometre. The Liberals kept the business case in a locked cabinet, and for good reason—because, for every dollar that was spent on the project, Victorians would have seen a benefit of a mere 45c. But the community would not stand for it. It was the people who won that campaign, with the Liberals losing what was dubbed by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott as 'a referendum on the East West Link'. Labor might have leapt to power in Victoria on the back of the Greens' and community's campaign against the toll road, but they do not seem to have learnt the lesson. They announced that they are pouring $400 million into adding more lanes to the Monash Freeway. It will inevitably become a 10-lane carpark.

This week we saw Brisbane's Airportlink sold to Transurban for $2 billion—60 per cent less than it cost to build just a few years ago. This loss of $2.8 billion comes off the back of a mess experienced since the start of this project by shareholders and every person paying tax. What a disgraceful waste. Four thousand kilometres away, the community is rallying against the Perth Freight Link, where the Liberals have once again underestimated the extent of the community outrage. A very similar story is playing out in Sydney with the Baird government's secretive WestConnex motorway.

The Greens will continue to stand with those who are protecting their homes, their wetlands and their parks until these bad projects are dumped. These governments must start making decisions in the interests of the people they represent rather than the interests of big motorway businesses. If they fail to do so, they will be thrown out.

The solution to our congestion woes does not lie down the same old path of more and more massive polluting tollways. We must give people a new way. We must give them an option of getting to work, to the shops or to visit a friend in a way that is quicker, cheaper and easier than driving their car. This means prioritising tram, train and bus projects and paths for people to safely walk and ride their bikes.

We hear a lot from many on the government benches about the need to reduce public spending. The good news is that shifting our focus from roads achieves just that. It will free up our roads for the people who need them most. Modelling from Vancouver—a city with a very similar transport makeup to Melbourne—shows the high cost to society for every kilometre driven by road. Travelling on public transport has a cost too, but it is a fraction of that of roads. In contrast, when someone walks or jumps on their bike, the health benefits provide a net gain to society as a whole. I will repeat that. There are massive costs to society for every kilometre travelled by car but big benefits to society for every kilometre walked or cycled. Under former Prime Minister Abbott and Prime Minister Turnbull, this economically responsible new way forward has been beaten by an ideological insistence on roads. Prime Minister Turnbull may be good at taking selfies on trains, but that has not addressed the lack of transparency and waste that we are still seeing with toll road projects around the country. We must put this old way of thinking where it belongs—in the past—and make it quicker, cheaper and easier for all Australians to get around.

Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just love following the Greens. It is like rainbows and lollipops. If we could all just bike and walk our way to work and address the significant freight task we have going forward as a country by walking and with pushbikes, we would be a better nation. It points once again to their absolute fixation on inner urban electorates and the elites in our community. They stand there and they profess that they are sticking up for workers. They profess to stick up for rural and regional Australia. They are doing nothing more than pandering to the elites in inner urban capital cities such as in my own home state of Victoria.

I rise to speak to the motion before us about the 'chaos, lack of transparency and waste surrounding the Abbott-Turnbull Government's outdated urban freeway projects', including, amongst other things, the East West Link in my home state of Victoria. Outdated! The Eddington report showed that the significant increase in cars on Melbourne's road infrastructure was actually going to increase from, I think, 165,000 cars to over 213,000 by 2030.

Senator Sterle made a significant contribution about the increased freight task going forward. That is the reality of the society, community and economy that we live in and work in and that provides the standard of living, particularly for those that have those wonderfully high house prices in Fitzroy—and that comes at a cost. That means we have to grow stuff and make stuff. We have to consume it domestically. We also have to get it to the ports to get it to the markets right around the world. So, Senator Rice, we have to build highways, we have to build bridges and we have to build railways because we need to get that product off the farm, down the road, onto port and out to market. Do you know what that does? That ensures that Australians have jobs and that local communities can do things together. They can educate their children, provide for their aged citizens and ensure that we have a sustainable health and education system because we have an economy that works and because we sell stuff to other people.

We are the infrastructure government and have made a $50 billion infrastructure commitment. We do not back away about being very proud of building the infrastructure that is going to help our nation grow and develop and be ready to maximise and take advantage of all the opportunities available to us in the 21st century, including those inherent in the free trade agreements negotiated this year and signed off by Minister Robb, which are going to have a fantastic impact on regional Australia. We also need our highways, bridges and railways for safety. Emergencies happen out in the regions. We have bushfires. We have floods. We have bushwalkers getting lost; we have issues in the snow. So we need infrastructure to ensure our community is safe. In the regions, we also need to ensure that our communities can socialise and that they can educate, volunteer, interact, play sport et cetera. That requires roads.

I am not sure how the under-13s from Irymple up in the Mallee will all get on their pushbikes to play their under-13 footy game on Saturday morning against Donald under-13s. They are going to have to leave Friday morning. They are going to have to skip school Friday so they can get on the pushbikes, Senator Rice, and get from Irymple down to Donald so they can compete against the under-13s in Donald. That is just ridiculous! It shows how out of touch the Greens are. Seriously, Senator Rice, are you going to subject the under-13s from Irymple to that? I cannot believe it.

I am straying, because I am supposed to be talking about East West Link. When we talked about the significant freight task—particularly in Victoria, the great state of ag—we recognised that earlier. It was the state coalition government that signed up to ensure that the Western Ring Road was connected to the Eastern Freeway. Do you know what that did, Senator Rice? In your contribution, you talked about people spending time in their cars, reducing the time they are able to spend with their families. Do you know what the East West Link would have done? It would have allowed people who now spend hours sitting gridlocked on Melbourne roads to be home an hour earlier. But do you know what it would cost? A small percentage of people in the inner urban electorates would have to have a tunnel under their homes.

So that is what we are really talking about. We are not talking about walking and pushbikes. We are talking about the people that are living in Laverton, the people that are living in Dandenong, the people that are living in Noble Park and Berwick and Lilydale. The people who do not vote for the Greens. They are the ones that will have to continue sitting in their cars, because they cannot walk to work, Senator Rice. They cannot pushbike to work. The East West Link was going to and could still deliver real benefits, not only in quality of life for Victorians, particularly for outer urban Melburnians, but also—and, I think, incredibly importantly, going forward, given that the greatest product off the dock every morning out of the port of Melbourne is Murray-Goulburn dairy product going to the markets of the world—by underpinning regional Victorian local economies. The East West Link project would have taken those tankers off roads that they are currently on and put them on a much more sustainable and faster and more efficient and effective route.

I know that poor Senator Sterle was bemoaning his Premier playing games in Western Australia. I tell you what: he is not the only one. Senator Sterle did not mention my own Premier, Premier Andrews, and the games that the Labor Party in the state of Victoria is playing with this particular project. If Senator Siewert, through this motion, thinks the government is chaotic and non-transparent and wasteful, how about she open a Victorian newspaper whilst sipping a Fitzroy latte? Or maybe she would be down at Clifton Hill. Collingwood, maybe, is her cafe of choice. I would say that she should take Senator Rice, but Senator Rice would be riding her bike, so it might take her some time to meet up with Senator Siewert. But I will leave them to work out the logistics of how they actually get to the inner urban cafe to sip their lattes. But, if she put her Age down and picked up a Herald Sunit might take a while to find one in Fitzroy—that is all she would have to do. If she turned its pages over the last couple of months, she would see the carnage of broken contracts that the Labor state government has caused. Goodbye, jobs. Goodbye, family time. Hello, drivetime radio—great for the ABC—which can only go so far to relieve driver boredom and stress.

The coalition government wants to help Victoria solve its growing east-west transportation dilemma, and that is why we have committed $3 billion to the East West Link as part of a broader $7.6 billion infrastructure funding commitment to the state through our Infrastructure Investment Program. It was the Victorian Labor government who, after coming to power in late 2014, cancelled this project which had the capacity to transform Victoria's transport network and the state economy. The Victorian Labor government originally indicated costs of around $400 million for cancelling contracts. That is okay, Victoria; it is only going to cost us $400 million to cancel the contracts! That is a lot of state schools. That is a lot of kindergartens. That is a lot of hospitals. That is a lot of nurses. That is a lot of teachers. That is okay—Andrews can write that off.

But do you know what is more appalling than him writing off $400 million for cancelling contracts? It now appears as though the full cost of cancellation will exceed $600 million. Thank you very much, Premier Andrews. How absolutely derelict is my Premier, the Premier of the great state of Victoria? The money of hardworking Victorians is handed over to not build the East West Link. I do not want to get all X gen on it, but I am going to quote Dire Straits—indeed Melbourne's congested roads are in dire straits—by saying that Victorians have unwillingly coughed up 'money for nothing' but they have definitely got their 'kicks for free'. What an absolute waste of money and a smack in the face for Victorians.

Cancelling the East West Link not only cost Victorian taxpayers money; it also cost around 7,000 jobs, not that Senator Rice is concerned about that, because people with these types of jobs do not vote for the Greens party. They vote for the Labor Party. They vote for the coalition. They never vote for the Greens. These are construction jobs. Senator Rice and Senator Siewert, through this matter of public importance, you are claiming that you want to give Victorians more time at home and deal with the freight task by riding pushbikes. I am not sure how I am going to get a tonne of wheat in my pushbike's little front basket to get it around, but anyway. It shows how absolutely out of touch you are as a party and why you are absolutely irrelevant to our future.

Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This matter of public importance correctly identifies the 'chaos, lack of transparency and waste' surrounding a range of major infrastructure projects. It is important to reflect on this, thinking about the importance of transport infrastructure for our economy and for the communities that we represent here. There are limited dollars available in the Commonwealth budget to support transport, and it is critical that the dollars that we do have go to projects that we know will improve the productivity of our economies and, as Senator McKenzie rightly points out, the wellbeing and the lifestyles of the people that we represent.

Unfortunately, what is required to do that is an evidence base, and what we have seen from the government over the last two years has been a complete unwillingness to consider evidence, to develop evidence, to use it in making decisions. On being elected, the coalition provided billions of dollars in funding for major projects prior to any assessment whatsoever by Infrastructure Australia. That included the East West Link and the Perth Freight Link. The business case for WestConnex was only last week released, despite calls for it for over two years. It has been left to hardworking local state members like Jo Haylen and Jodi McKay to hold the New South Wales government to account and to demand that this information be brought into the public domain.

In all of these cases, the funding was allocated and, in the case of the East West Link and WestConnex, paid to the states prior to the assessment processes having been completed. This is not merely a technical problem or a bureaucratic problem, because, as a consequence of proceeding in this way, as a consequence of rushed processes, poor processes, processes in breach of election commitments, these projects have become mired in controversy and confusion. There have been constant changes to the scope and the routes, and it has brought out ridicule and cynicism amongst the broader community about the way that the Commonwealth goes about establishing transport projects.

It stands in stark contrast to the approach that we on this side of the chamber took to this issue when we were in office. In 2008 we understood that this was a real issue that we needed to grapple with, and we established Infrastructure Australia. It was a body explicitly designed to bring evidence to the fore. It was designed to independently assess infrastructure proposals using proper cost-benefit analysis. It was designed to some extent to take the politics out of decision making, to make decisions on the basis of economic benefit, not for political or other considerations. The way it went about that was that it produced an annual infrastructure priority list and it listed projects in order in terms of their ability to promote productivity. In government, we followed those recommendations. The top 15 priority projects developed by IA were funded by Labor, and we also used that body to produce national infrastructure audits as well as national freight, land and urban transport strategies.

The coalition came to government promising to maintain this approach and indeed promising to extend and intensify it. Their election policy said that they would make Infrastructure Australia a more transparent, accountable and effective adviser on the planning, selection and procurement of infrastructure projects. What actually happened was that the coalition introduced legislation to the parliament in November 2013 that sought not to give more power to Infrastructure Australia but to increase the minister's power to interfere in the decision-making processes of that body. It was only because of the good sense of the senators in this chamber that that proposal was blocked.

The policy also said that there would be a rigorous and transparent assessment of tax funded projects and that they would require all infrastructure projects worth more than $100 million to undergo a cost-benefit analysis. As I have already mentioned, the money for the East West Link and the Perth Freight Link was provided before these processes took place, before IA had a chance to assess those projects—absolutely in breach of the promises made by the coalition before coming to government and absolutely to the detriment of good policy, sound investment and productivity in the states where those moneys were allocated.

I want to talk a little bit about WestConnex in my home state of New South Wales because, despite having $25 million to support the development of a business case as part of proper planning, the full business case was only released in redacted form last week. That saw in 2014 the New South Wales Auditor-General highly critical of the New South Wales government's compliance with its own project planning and approvals process, and major elements of that project have been sent back to the drawing board.

The failure to properly articulate the case for WestConnex to explain what its role might be and the failure to consult with local people has meant that there is enormous public cynicism about the government's motives in supporting this project. And every time a government does this around questions of infrastructure, it diminishes our ability to make the decisions that we need to make as a government to fund sensible projects to improve our cities. It is absolutely critical that we get this right.

People talk in general terms about the economic benefits of increased connectivity in cities, but what we forget is that there are real lived experiences behind that economic story. Transport is not an end in itself. It is a link between places that people want to be, where they are now and where they would like to get to. It is enormously important in terms of creating productive cities where people can get access to the jobs that they need to secure themselves and their families' livelihoods.

The Grattan Institute has done some excellent work around this: looking in my home town of Sydney, in some suburbs, only 14 per cent of the total jobs available in Sydney can be accessed within a 45-minute car trip. It is even worse—much worse—if you are reliant on public transport. In many outer suburbs of Sydney, they offer access to fewer than one in 10 of the cities' jobs within an hour's travel on public transport.

Of course I want to draw this chamber's attention to the fact that this has a gender dimension: women's workforce participation falls dramatically in Sydney's outer suburbs, and this is related to the availability of transport and the accessibility of jobs. Men and women in Sydney's eastern suburbs and inner west participate in the workforce in relatively similar levels but, in parts of Sydney's outer western and south-west, workforce participation falls to more than 20 per cent below that of men's. In part it is because of women's caring responsibilities that require them to have jobs that are within easy transport distance of their homes. If they need to get their children from school or take care of a sick parent or a disabled relative, they need to be working in a job that is within easy access of their home. The absence of transport options is absolutely making lives harder for residents in these parts of my city.

The frustration for me—and I want to say this very clearly—is that, every time we muck up one of these projects, every time we fail to engage the community and every time we fail to present the evidence about the significance of one of these projects and we generate cynicism, we decrease our ability to make the decisions that we need to make our cities work.

Transport is a most significant issue. We know that there are limited resources in the budget and we know that we need to apply those resources efficiently. We need to apply them to the projects that can really make a difference. An efficient investment does not mean prioritising road all the time to the exclusion of all other modes of transport. It also does not mean prioritising rail to the exclusion of all other forms of transport. It means gathering the evidence and making an evidence based decision about what will be the best project to provide the transport solution. That is the approach that people on this side of the chamber took whilst in government. That is the approach we recommend, and it is a terrible shame that the government does not adopt— (Time expired)

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It has been fascinating listening to the various sides of the chamber grappling with these questions of transport planning and freight movement for the 21st century—from Senator Sterle's contribution and his background in the trucking industry to the bizarre rant by Senator McKenzie who assumed that, if you did not support the establishment of eight-lane freight highways through sensitive wetlands and suburban areas, you must want to transport freight by bicycle. The divide in this parliament, I think, has never been greater around the provision of public transport infrastructure.

I would also suggest that some of those coalition contributions that we have heard this afternoon have been quite stridently out of step with the new pitch and tone that I think Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is trying to establish. It will be interesting to see whether he is going to be able to bring his colleagues into line. This is no longer a question of rhetoric or messaging, because very substantial sums of public money are about to be invested by the Turnbull government and there will not be any place to hide.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is visiting Western Australia on 9 December, we understand, and a short time ago my office hand delivered a letter to his office inviting him—I think, probably this is his first visit to the state of WA since taking office—to visit the Beeliar Wetlands and to meet with local residents and me. This is an area that people have been defending for more than 20 years from proposals to put freeway infrastructure bisecting the wetlands and flattening one of the last really decent stretches of old-growth banksia and mature woodland in the Perth metropolitan area.

In his contribution, Senator Back went to great lengths to talk about the Stephenson-Hepburn plan of 1955. Senator Back, with the greatest respect, transport planning has moved on some since 1955. Ms MacTiernan, the ALP member for Perth, who was planning minister, was briefly sledged by Senator Back for deleting the Fremantle eastern bypass. Ms MacTiernan does not need me to come in here and defend her—she is perfectly capable of standing up for her record—but she was absolutely right. She was absolutely spot-on. I do not know whether Senator Back realises it, but he just stood in here and advocated a four-lane freight highway through White Gum Valley and East Fremantle. It would have been an absolute catastrophe for that highway to have been smashed through those quiet suburban streets. Yet Senator Back is still in here condemning the former minister, Alannah MacTiernan, for doing what the community at the time was demanding and what was exactly the right thing to do.

I do not know how well-known this is—I presume Senator Back knows this, as I think he has lived in Perth his whole life—but the Stephenson-Hepburn plan of 1955 had a freeway and an overpass going over the river from a Stock Road extension at Point Walter onto Jutland Parade in Dalkeith, which is the street that for a while had—I do not know if it still has—the most expensive real estate in Perth. That got deleted and nobody misses it. It did not do any damage at all. We do not have to stick to the cast-iron template set down in 1955—which, we should also say was somewhat farsighted for its time. It had a huge amount of public transport infrastructure in it that successive governments failed to introduce. It was on the planning books but never actually made it to the ground.

Our invitation to Mr Turnbull when he visits Perth on 9 December is a very simple. The Prime Minister has the opportunity to put his state colleagues in their place, because they are in the process of seeking nearly a billion in Commonwealth funding for what I would say is now the greatest planning debacle in Western Australian history. I have never in my life seen incompetence on this scale for a project of this scale. They are making it up as they go along. Premier Barnett is now in open conflict with his hapless transport minister, Mr Dean Nalder. They cannot agree from one day to the next where this freeway is supposed to go, and they have their hands out for nearly a billion dollars. One day it is a tunnel and one day it is a trench. They still do not know how they are getting it into North Fremantle. People are having to piece together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of this catastrophic puzzle on the fly. After a while you realise that the reason we cannot find any coherence or sense in the Perth freight link is that it is not there to find. When Prime Minister Turnbull arrives in Perth he will be met and welcomed by the local community if he is willing to have a real talk with Premier Barnett and whoever happens to be transport minister at the time—because this can be fixed very easily.

It was actually good to hear Senator Back acknowledge the outer harbour. A new overflow container terminal in Cockburn Sound is simply a matter of time. It will need to be built. He said that it could not be built in less than 10 to 15 years. Fremantle Port and many others beg to differ. Seven years is the period of time that I have seen that we could get an overflow container terminal built in Cockburn Sound. There is already an uninterrupted stretch of freight freeway on Tonkin Highway between Kewdale and Orrong Road, and there is an almost direct and unbroken freight-rail link between the Kewdale container terminal and the site of the proposed outer harbour. The solution is actually right there in front of us. Rather than torching $2.2 billion—or whatever it is up to these days—of state and federal funds for wherever the Barnett government lands on the freight link, we can start that investment now, today, at the outer harbour and resolve this once and for all, with a dedicated road and rail link to a new overflow container terminal. Nobody in their right mind would try to move 1.5 million boxes a year through the container terminal at Fremantle. It is simply not going to happen.

So Prime Minister Turnbull, when he visits Perth in a week or so—a week and a half—will be met by a sustained and growing movement of ordinary people. Fifteen thousand people have already signed their names against this project. There are 31 formal organisations in the Save Beeliar Wetlands Coalition, including some who have been active on this campaign literally for decades. Yesterday, when drilling began, many of those people were there. The Western Australia Police, who are unfortunately going to be the meat in the sandwich at this confrontation that will simply escalate, were there in numbers and so were ordinary members of the community, who sat down in front of vehicles until the Main Roads Department moved that drilling rig offsite. There are many legal avenues. The environmental approval by the state EPA is presently tied up in the state Supreme Court. That is a matter that will be heard within a week. Only in the last 48 hours an application for an emergency declaration under section 9 of the federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act has been lodged. And it is likely that this project will also be challenged in the Federal Court, because Minister Hunt's approval was based on flawed state approvals.

The federal Liberal Party and the National Party, despite some of the rather poorly informed commentary that we have heard from them this afternoon, do have the opportunity in an election year to differentiate themselves very sharply from their state colleagues. If they do so, I personally—and I imagine I would speak for a reasonable number of participants in this debate from right across the political spectrum—will not be beating them up for a backflip; I will be congratulating them for seeing reason. The Perth freight link will not be going ahead. As much as Senator Sterle would like to joke about politicians chained to earthmoving equipment, it has been a long while since I have been arrested for non-violent civil disobedience.

Senator Canavan interjecting—

You can laugh all you like, Senator Canavan. One day if a project such as this is passing your back fence you might find yourself in this position too when you realise just how poorly conceived some of these funding decisions are. Local community members from North Lake, Bibra Lake, Perth's western suburbs and also from much further afield—as we discovered at a rally just this past weekend—have pledged non-violent civil disobedience, and I and many others will be standing shoulder to shoulder with them.

The Prime Minister has the opportunity when he visits Western Australia in 10 or so days to actually resolve this issue once and for all. It is not an intractable planning decision that has been made here. It is not an intractable confrontation. There is a solution that is staring us right in the face. Professor Peter Newman and his team at CUSP, the local governments who have found themselves in the path of this immensely unpopular project, residents, those who have just taken the time to inform themselves, Aboriginal people who are trying to protect 40,000 years of continuous occupation and culture over that piece of country and a very wide political coalition—all of us—standing together will welcome the Prime Minister or any of his federal Liberal-National colleagues if, when they visit Perth, they swing that large public investment behind a genuinely scalable freight solution for Perth's suburbs. That proposal is there on the table. It is reasonably well delineated.

It would have fallen at the first hurdle if we had a genuinely independent assessment process for Commonwealth infrastructure funding because the state government has chosen to put no information into the public domain at all. If they are so proud of their project, the first thing they should do is table the full business case, table the freight modelling and table any one of the nine freedom of information requests that have been denied that we have submitted and that other colleagues have submitted. If this project is so great, put the evidence on the table. It is going to be a disaster. It will not get built, but fortunately the solutions are well at hand.

Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Urban motorways reveal some of the worst aspects of how major parties do politics and the worst aspects of their own transport policies. In Sydney we have this madness of a WestConnex urban motorway project. A 33-kilometre, dirty tollway that would divide Sydney, bring greater air pollution, increase congestion, divide suburbs and rip up bike lanes. We know that is so often the case because we have seen it in the past with urban motorway projects that have brought so many problems—not just transport, not just health wise but also economic. There have been disasters.

We know who the winners are out of this. The winners are the mates of the Liberals and Labor—the developers and motorway builders—who stand to pick up the billions of dollars that is the cost of these massive projects. In Sydney we have the Cross City Tunnel that has gone into receivership twice. The Lane Cove Tunnel has been in receivership once. On both those motorway projects bike lanes that had to be built as part of the project were subsequently ripped up as one problem with the project after another had to be solved, and they partly tried to do that by ripping up bike lanes.

What we also know from experience with these urban motorways is that there is a huge fudge when it comes to the business case. The assertions that there are so many cars that will use this and that great profits can be made out of these motorways. Again, going to the Cross City Tunnel, that is just a joke. To this day so often you cannot see a car in it as you go through it.

I pay tribute to the EcoTransit organisation, and particularly to Michelle Zeibots who identified the problem early on that you could not trust the figures. Right from the beginning the backers of the Cross City Tunnel said 95,000 cars would use this tunnel. Ms Zeibots identified that you could not fit that many cars in it in a day. Now it is running at about 40,000 and it is not expected that it will increase very much at all.

Coming back to the WestConnex, again we see the problems with the transport policies of Liberal and Labor. There has already been a blow-out. A project that started as supposedly $10 billion in 2012 is now out to $16.8 billion, and this is what the state and federal governments are combining forces to push through.

Imagine what that money could do if spent on public transport. The solutions it would bring to Sydney would be fantastic. But it is money that could be spent in other areas—other capital cities or regional areas—that are crying out for public transport. Now we have this madness of the WestConnex project running at what we understand are $26 tolls with tens of thousands of cars dumped into the inner city. That effectively is the policy that Labor and the Liberals would bring to our city if it is allowed to proceed.

Again, it does put the spotlight on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. He cannot get away with making out he is a great advocate of public transport if he is going to allow the WestConnex project to go ahead in his city. It will divide suburbs, cause more congestion, which will lead to more air pollution and more health problems, rob money from public transport and make it harder for a lot of businesses that are along the main roads where there will be 24-hour clearways. Every way you look at this project it is a disaster.

What adds to the outrage is that now there is an asbestos scandal building around this, as large numbers of trucks are moving asbestos from the St Peters area, where they will want to build a spaghetti junction, out to Western Sydney, dumping it at a waste facility that has on its website that it does not take asbestos. And now they are discovering asbestos along the M5 Motorway, which has to be expanded as part of the WestConnex project. I have visited residents who are deeply concerned that asbestos is in their backyard, it has not been properly stored and it is being disturbed in the ways that we know are so wrong.

This is a project that really should be stopped now. Let's get those billions of dollars into public transport. It is a policy of urban motorways and it is a failed policy. It is 2015. We hear from so many politicians in this place that we need liveable cities. What goes hand in hand with liveable cities is public transport. Public transport needs money. The projects that we need have been identified—light rail, heavy rail and more buses. We can do it with clean energy. The future is clear.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for the discussion has expired.