George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always scintillating to hear the fairytales from the member for Grayndler—like Aesop's fables, Albo's fables—when it comes to the Bruce Highway. But I will give him this: he is one of the few members opposite who knows where the Bruce Highway is and can probably find it on a map. He said that he has driven it. He has probably seen a lot more of it than most of his colleagues, who may have seen a few bits of the Bruce Highway—probably from about 40,000 feet on their way from one photo opportunity to the next. The reason they fly to these photo opportunities is that none of them live anywhere near the Bruce Highway. That is the reality. The former minister spoke about Vantassel Street to Flinders Highway and it all being some sort of Labor achievement along with the Sandy Corner to Collinsons Lagoon upgrade in my electorate. The only reason those projects are on the table is that the Liberal-National coalition and I held the government to account when they were trying to pull both of those projects off the agenda.

The Bruce Highway, for the benefit of those opposite, is the main transport artery of Queensland. In all its glory, it stretches 1,700 kilometres from Cairns in the Far North to Brisbane in the south-east—1,700 kilometres and not one metre of it is represented by a member from the Labor Party. They need to ask themselves why that is. We speak of the Bruce as a highway running from the north to the south not because we live in the north but because that is the direction in which the nation's wealth is carried. We create the wealth in the north and the Bruce Highway delivers it to the capital cities in the south. It has been seen as one-way traffic, until now. The Liberal-National government are reversing the flow and are committed to delivering far and away the largest investment in transport infrastructure the Bruce Highway has ever seen. We listened to locals, councils, businesses, automobile clubs and safety groups like the Road Accident Action Group in my hometown of Mackay. We listened to the Queensland government and what they said was required to bring the highway up to scratch. We saw the Liberal-National government in Queensland commit an additional $1 billion over 10 years to the Bruce. And before the 2013 election, this Liberal-National coalition committed to investing $6.7 billion over 10 years to the Bruce Highway. That is in stark contrast to what the Labor Party put on the table—in fact, it was $2.6 billion more than the Labor Party's commitment. Since then, the Liberal-National government has reaffirmed its commitment and is getting on with the job of delivering its promises.

We are getting on with the job of fixing the worst spots of the Bruce Highway, including projects in my electorate like upgrading the dangerous Haughton River bridge in the Burdekin and fixing flood-prone areas like Yellow Gin Creek near Townsville and Sandy Gully near Bowen, where it only takes a cane toad to take a whiz on the side of the road for that highway to be cut. We are funding planning work on the Goorganga Plains in relation to a serious flooding issue that cuts off the Whitsunday Coast Airport from the Whitsunday Coast—an issue that the Queensland Labor government at the time did not even recognise existed in their 2011 report on the Bruce Highway. But locals were acutely aware of the problem.

The Liberal-National coalition know because we actually took the time to talk to them and to experience the Bruce Highway firsthand. In 2012, along with the then shadow transport minister and now Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development and Deputy Prime Minister, I drove every single one of the 1,700 kilometres of the Bruce Highway. Our convoy included about 11 Liberal Party and National Party MPs, state and federal, who have sections of the Bruce Highway in their electorate. We spoke with locals to seek advice and to help us formulate a plan to fix the dangerous black spots, to fix the flood-prone areas and to fix the congestion.

One part of the plan is to ease congestion and get heavy vehicles off local roads with construction of the Mackay Ring Road. The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government spent $10 million on a feasibility study on the Mackay Ring Road and then did nothing. The member for Herbert said to me just before that Labor always finds it easy to put ink on paper, but it is different to seeing bitumen on the road.

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