Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Heritage, the Arts and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to also speak to the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2008. Nothing is more important in Australia, given our extraordinarily large continent and our tyranny of distance, than ensuring we have an efficient transport system. It is ironic that the legislation is entitled in part ‘National Land Transport’, because looking at the continent you would think that we would also have a coastal shipping business that was thriving and was currently being seen as offering potential for us to significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. But currently there is a whole range of very serious issues affecting Australian coastal shipping which is the subject of a report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government that will soon be released.

My electorate of Murray is in fact the transport hub of Victoria. It currently serves what we call the food bowl of the Murray-Darling Basin. It has extraordinary production in the form of dairy and fruit. All of that product is shifted from central Victoria or inland Victoria to the ports for export or to local manufacturers and then that finished product goes right around Australia. If we do not have extensive and efficient hubs of transport, such as rail systems and road systems, and a dispersal of product that is efficient, then we cannot continue to be acknowledged as having world’s best practice when it comes to the most cost-efficient food and fibre production.

I am very concerned about one of the key initiatives that occurred under the coalition government: the duplication and upgrading of the Goulburn Valley Highway, which was federally funded in 1996. That was at a time when we had, if you like, a strict division of labour between the states and the federal government in highway funding. The Goulburn Valley Highway comes off the Hume Highway and goes via Tocumwal to become part of the Newell Highway. Under the coalition government this highway was made virtually a dual freeway from the off-take at Hume, near Seymour, right through to Shepparton. But, sadly, there were still two major tasks to go—one was bypassing Nagambie, the other bypassing the city of Shepparton itself. Nagambie is only a small town but has an enormous amount of transport going right through the middle of that town—B-doubles, smaller freight vehicles and significant domestic transport. Those trucks and cars have to slow down to 40 kilometres an hour at school times and then to 50 kilometres an hour, causing major problems such as noise, carbon emissions and safety. The Goulburn Valley Highway goes down to a single lane at that point. It is also about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Melbourne. That means people are already tired from their long trip. Deaths occur when the road goes from a double-lane freeway down to a single lane just before Nagambie. I am sad to say that deaths are occurring there regularly because people are not concentrating and they think they are still on a dual freeway. Then you go through Nagambie, having slowed down to 40 kilometres an hour, with numerous traffic lights and so on, and back on to a section of freeway through to what is called the Arcadia section—and, gloriously, that was opened just a few months ago.

I was sad not to have been invited to the opening, since it was 100 per cent federally funded. The opening was conducted by VicRoads, the Victorian state road authority. I would have thought it polite to have invited the local federal members, being me, the member for McEwen and indeed the member for Indi, but that did not occur. The good news is that at least the local community understood that it was the coalition Commonwealth government which had funded all of that work to bring the freeway right up to the outskirts of Shepparton.

You can imagine that coming up to last year’s federal election the northern Victorian communities were most concerned to see that the bypassing of Nagambie and Shepparton were top of mind for both the coalition and what was then the opposition, now the Rudd government. The opposition put on the table a commitment that they would in fact fund the Nagambie bypass to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, as did the coalition. Of course, being fairly simple folk, we then assumed, having that commitment in writing, announced by the shadow minister of the day, that when the Rudd Labor government won office there would be—in this last budget—an announcement or a commitment in writing to that funding for the Nagambie bypass. It was a shock when only $5 million in fact appeared in the budget, not the $350 million or so needed. When investigated, the feedback from the government was: ‘We said we’d fund it, but we didn’t say when’ and basically, ‘Watch this space.’ It was a terrible shock because VicRoads, which is the managing contractor for all federally funded roads in the state, was ready to march on with its contractors to the next section. The Arcadia section had been completed; it would have been more efficient to go on immediately and do that Nagambie bypass work. The planning had been completed; it was all ready to go. But, no, we discovered that in the budget there was only $5 million.

We do hope that, in light of the extraordinary transport use of the Goulburn Valley Highway—its significance for food and fibre transport—and the deaths that are occurring in those unfinished sections, the Commonwealth government in its national transport planning will look kindly at future funding that includes completing the Goulburn Valley Highway. It is extremely important, under our national land transport task, that we understand that in rural and regional Australia some local government bodies are actually returning bitumen to gravel because they cannot afford to do essential road making. As I have often said in this place, we have tomato growers who cannot get their product to factories in time to be processed because there has been a light sprinkling of rain and the dirt roads bog their B-doubles. That is extraordinary in the 21st century in a developed nation like ours.

I strongly commend to the government the transport task of doing a job that is efficient and effective for the whole of the nation. The coalition understood the significance. We understood the importance of—for the first time in Australia—decent funding to make sure the transport effort in this country was more efficient and to make sure that our domestic and export activity was not impeded by poor transport. We also know that, with the greenhouse challenges, better transport will mean fewer emissions.

So I ask that this government, in addition to the other things I have been saying, looks a little harder at completing the Goulburn Valley Highway. I support the other speakers from the coalition in saying that there are many unfinished tasks. I request that this government goes and looks at what we were doing. It could not do better than to continue the job we set out to do.

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