Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like the minister to address the issue of the government's policy of not supporting urban rail projects. I am particularly asking it in the context of Perth. Minister, you would have seen the Infrastructure Australia audit which showed that, by 2030, seven out of the 10 most congested corridors in Australia will be occurring in Perth, so Perth is on track to become the congestion capital of Australia. Over the next 10 years we are going to see congestion rising in Perth to a really quite alarming extent.

Another fact revealed in that audit is that in Perth only five per cent of trips are taken on public transport. This compares with Sydney which I think is 12 per cent and Melbourne which is 15 per cent. Quite clearly in Western Australia, particularly in recent years, there has not been any investment into the upgrade of their public transport network. We have seen as a direct result of your policies that the Barnett government has abandoned various rail projects that it committed to in the 2013 election. It committed to, for example, the MAX light rail project, from the northern suburbs to the western and eastern suburbs south of the river—a very strong project committed to and described as fully funded and fully costed. This was a project that was eligible for the $500 million that federal Labor had placed in the budget. But the minister chose to take that out of the budget and instead replace it with the Perth Freight Link.

Minister, do you accept that Western Australia is a clear example of where your policy of refusing to fund urban rail is changing the behaviour of state governments, seeing them disinvesting in rail projects? We see this so clearly in Western Australia. The government was going to be proceeding with two rail projects. Once you took the money out of the budget and redirected it and demanded that it could only be spent on road, that reoriented states towards road projects, further contributing to that congestion problem. You are quite clearly never going to be able to reduce the levels of congestion without proper investment in public transport. Your policy does not, as you claim it does, free up state governments to spend more money on rail. Rather, it gets the state governments to take their limited infrastructure funds and move them from rail projects onto road projects, as they chase Commonwealth dollars. All of the projections are that Perth is on target to be the congestion capital of Australia because we have stopped investing in public transport. In the last six years there has been a virtual cessation of investment in the expansion of the public transport network. So, Minister, I want you to clarify for us what your policy is about rail and do you accept that it has this consequence of changing the behaviour of state governments, that it entices them to pull their money out of rail projects and put it into road projects so they can get matching Commonwealth dollars?

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