Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will have to put out a press release in Dawson to remind them that a couple of years ago the electorate of O’Connor got $100 million out of Commonwealth funding and, I think, about $50 million out of Roads to Recovery. I was always able to boast that it was the highest allocation for any electorate in Australia. But I did not boast too loudly, because it was all provided on a formula anyway. Whilst the member for Dawson is entitled to self-congratulation, the fact of life is that most decisions on roadworks, including those in my electorate, are made by the state roads departments and are based upon the funds made available to the various states by the Commonwealth as part of its program of funding.

But isn’t it amazing when people start to talk about doing the right thing? We have just seen retribution taken upon the Carpenter government in Western Australia—or, as I used to call it, the McGinty-MacTiernan government—based on road funding. The growth south of Perth to places like Bunbury and areas south of that—Busselton and the Margaret River—has been exponential. The road system was a disgrace. There was a significant lack of passing lanes. As I speak, there is an ongoing high level of fatalities from crashes on that road.

The good offices of two members—the then member for Forrest, Geoff Prosser, and the incumbent member for Canning, Don Randall—campaigned to our leadership for a significant contribution over and above that funding to extend what is known as the Kwinana Freeway so that it could pass through Bunbury with an appropriate two-lane freeway system. Consequently, and to his credit, the then minister approached the WA government—the WA roads minister was Alannah MacTiernan—and offered 50 per cent of the costs. Alannah MacTiernan replied that she did not want the money. To be honest, I think we went the other way around. We asked how much the road would cost, and she said $300 million. We said, ‘We’ll give you half.’ She said that was not enough. We said, ‘How much more do you want?’ We eventually offered her $170 million, which, on her estimate, was half the cost. She said again that she did not want the money because she could not find the other half—too bad that people were getting killed on virtually a weekly basis.

As Western Australian Liberals, we had to get together and insist that the federal minister withhold the typical annual grant of some hundreds of millions dollars until Alannah MacTiernan accepted the money and did the job. The minister was subjected to abuse and advertisements in the paper and everything—and we insisted that he hold the line. In the end, that Western Australian minister took the money and commenced the work. In fact, that work is now well advanced. As I have read in the papers, this government has continued its contribution of half the cost, for which it can be congratulated because, as is typical in the present-day environment, the costs keep escalating at a fairly rapid rate. Of all the initiatives that governments can take, building better roads is the one that saves lives. That is where lives get saved—on the road.

In referring to legislation I always look at the explanatory memorandum. Included in the explanatory memorandum to the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2008 is a financial impact statement, and the money that we are authorising to be spent will be available only subject to the Senate allowing the increase to the road user charge. We have truckies selling their trucks. The Leader of the Opposition drew to our attention the other day that there have been 3,000 repossessions. The price of diesel has gone through the roof. Many subcontract drivers find it extremely difficult to get their contracts altered. I think that is unfortunate. The rise and fall clauses in many areas—including, I might add, with Australia Post’s subcontractors—are delayed to a point when it gets very painful. And we have the government proposing to increase the road user charge. Why would you do that? Why would you increase the road user charge?

There is a quote in the second reading speech about what our minister said on one occasion. I would like to know the context in which it was said, because every time the Australian Transport Council recommended an increase in these charges we opposed it. The recommendation would come through to the minister, and the backbench on this side of the House always opposed it. One reason for that is that any charge you put onto an intermediate service means the cost is passed on to the consumer. The member for Kalgoorlie was just speaking. If you go into the member for Kalgoorlie’s electorate, you have a great choice of transport for all areas north of Geraldton, which is in my electorate—that is, road transport. There is no rail. There is airfreight, if you think you can afford to pay for that. There is no state shipping service, as there once was—notwithstanding that that was run by a government under the auspices of the Seamens Union. It was so expensive that trucks going down dirt roads could be cheaper.

We are being told that these sums—$10 million in 2008-09, $20 million in 2009-10 and thereafter to 2011-12—will only be expended if the road user charge goes up. So the purpose of this legislation is to tell the truckies: ‘If you want improved off-road areas in which to take a rest and you want them to be in reasonable condition to drive your truck onto, you are going to have to pay for it.’ Yet the industry is in grave distress at the moment due primarily to the cost of fuel—and as we know, as the price of crude oil is falling so is the Australian dollar, and the actual cost is not changing very much.

If you want truckies to take more rest, I think there is a hint in this. There is a suggestion that some of this money might be spent on electronic surveillance and that that would be a better way of achieving an outcome than a logbook. We have never had logbooks in Western Australia, and I do not think the incidence of crashes over there is any greater than anywhere else. By the way, I had better declare an interest. I still hold a heavy haulage truck driver’s licence and in the early years I was a significant trucking operator around the town of Carnarvon. We formed a co-op to cart freight into our town and the produce of that region back to Perth. It was I who first convinced the then Liberal state Minister for Transport that two-trailer double-bottom road trains were not some invention of the devil that religiously and continuously drove over the top of motorists. He agreed with me and gave us a trial because we were trying to cart produce at a competitive price to Perth, a 600-mile journey. It was a trial with four road trains. It was so successful he opened up the road out of Perth to all such vehicles. They now have three trailers and still they do not run over any more people than a single trailer. As far as I am concerned, when I am on the road I would rather pass one road train with three trailers than three semitrailers all tailgating—though legally they should not do that.

Furthermore, even though that approval was given, originally the breakdown area was 30 kilometres out of Perth. The Richard Court government ran a trial and brought those sorts of vehicles into the city. Everybody said that would be the end of the earth and that people would get run over, but they have been operating like that since then. In the Labor state government, Alannah MacTiernan did everything in her power to try and stop them. The fact is that they improve efficiency. They run around the city on designated routes—and that is quite sensible—but they do not make any trouble.

I have watched the eastern states, and South Australia in particular, come up with all sorts of draconian measures that seem to have a lot more to do with collecting revenue than with road safety. I have never been able to understand why somebody driving out of Western Australia with a perfectly legal vehicle is fined up to $1,000, because the specification of that vehicle changes as they cross the WA-South Australian border. To be honest, I would not mind it if they were to put the money into their roads, because those roads are typically pretty lousy.

I know quite a lot about trucks and I know this: every time you increase a truck driver’s costs he will attempt to drive further to recover the losses. While people are preaching road safety and want to put electronic measurement on the trucks to ensure that truckies only drive given distances, if you increase their costs then they will go out of business.

Let me refer, in this financial impact statement, to the fact that after 2009-2010 the Commonwealth is going to add an extra $50 million to the Roads to Recovery program. It is one of the few programs implemented over the term of the Howard government that the Rudd government has retained. All of the others, such as the Investing in Our Schools Program and Regional Partnerships—all funding programs aimed at the smaller, regional and remote areas of Australia—were scrubbed. Nevertheless, I welcome that extra $50 million a year. When the Liberal government introduced the Roads to Recovery program it was based on the fact that it was known that at that time the local government sector was getting $600 million a year behind in the maintenance of its road network, which the minister reminds me in his second reading speech, was 810,000 kilometres. We put up half of the funding.

In Western Australia, the then Gallop government took back some of the money they were putting in, notwithstanding that Prime Minister Howard had entreated all premiers not to back off on their commitment to roads. As a minister some years ago, on a visit to Birdsville I was taken out, with great pride, on a state government road on which they had spent their Roads to Recovery money. There was some sense in that—inasmuch as most of their so-called road network was on pastoral properties and, when they had previously approached the Labor government in Queensland to get some work done on this road, they were told, ‘You might get it within 50 years.’ They probably did the right thing but, on the other hand, that was not the intention of the funding. I note that this legislation better defines the opportunity for those sorts of things to happen.

In reality the message here is: we will upgrade your off-road parking and do things of that nature, but you are going to pay for it. I do not think the truckies want it that badly. In the present environment they cannot afford to have additional fuel taxes, which is what the road user charge is, placed upon them. And until there is a highly sophisticated electronic management system installed across all Australia, they will cheat on their logbooks and they will drive excessively long hours to try to save their trucks and probably the house they have mortgaged in the process of buying it. That is not smart; it is silly. I do not believe that, typically, these roads are built for trucks. They are built for motorists because there is a large number of them. And it does not matter which side of parliament you are on, you take notice of those people.

I do not agree with the argument that the railways put forward, that they do not get that degree of assistance. The railway system of Australia was constantly protected from open competition from the trucking industry, more particularly on the east coast, and for many years truck configurations were restricted to semitrailers to guarantee that the bloated and unionised rail system could compete. The moment you started to make a B-double or chuck a couple of trailers behind, amazingly, rail could not compete. As we know, in general goods transport there is only one bit of the rail system that is profitable today and that is the bit between Port Augusta, in particular Port Pirie, and Perth. That is partly because of the length of the journey and of course the large volumes of freight that come out of the Eastern States to WA because of the prosperity we have in that state.

The last election, in the electorate of Hasluck, was fought on the opposition by the elected member to a new brickworks in Perth, which happened to be built in that area as the state government would not allocate any land for it anywhere, because they did not like Len Buckeridge, the bloke who was going to build the brickworks, because he does not force his workers to join a union. He does not stop them. Part of that freight coming across the Nullarbor was bricks to the brick and tile state. Why would you do that? In the end, the Commonwealth had to allocate land in not the best locality in Perth so this bloke could build a brickworks to maintain supply to the homeowners in Western Australia and to prevent the necessary carting of bricks right across Australia. And you wonder why the price of houses goes up. Yet the then McGinty-MacTiernan government, otherwise headed by Gallop or Carpenter, were not prepared to allocate any land. The machinery to be operated in that brickworks stayed in storage for three years, while a bloke who was trying to do no more than provide more bricks, typically at a more competitive price, was stopped from building a new brickworks anywhere.

Might I add, while we are on transport, I am writing to the new Premier of Western Australia to get him to complete an agreement that the Richard Court government made to let this same fellow build a private port. He has had an agreement with the parliament of Western Australia and for two terms of office—or a little less than that, as the public of Western Australia have decided—the previous WA government have prevented that construction. Why would you do that other than to prop up your inefficient government port authority?

In that regard, there is an absolute need for additional capacity. Ships carrying live sheep have come into Western Australia from the Eastern States half loaded. They have had to anchor out at sea because they could not get alongside to pick up the rest of the load. And people talk about cruelty to animals in this form of transport! Why would you do that? If the previous government, specifically McGinty and MacTiernan, had allowed this fellow to go ahead immediately upon getting the contract and the environmental approvals, that port would be operating today to the benefit of business and it would have taken a lot of trucks away from the Fremantle port and those road systems. (Time expired)

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