Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will get to that. The member for Deakin has raised an important issue. It has taken a lot of effort by locals to campaign very effectively, as they have done, to finally achieve a commitment for the commencement of the construction of the Deer Park bypass this year. But it has been very late in providing this important piece of transport infrastructure and it will be some years before we see the final completion of that bypass. For many years ahead constituents of the electorate, particularly in the south-west region, are going to be frustrated. This will add to any unhappiness that they may experience in their everyday lives.

The Commonwealth certainly made a commitment, but it is very late in the piece to be ensuring that that vital piece of infrastructure is built. It will benefit not only residents in my electorate but also residents in Melton, Bacchus Marsh and Ballarat. Indeed, it will be important for freight users between Adelaide and Melbourne. It is the second most used highway in Victoria and it has been neglected. In my view, it has been neglected primarily because the Commonwealth has not seen fit to focus on that area. It does not see any electoral advantage in doing so. It does not see benefits in terms of seats going to government. Areas with less merit and less reasoned argument about transport use have received Commonwealth money. Indeed, Queensland has had far more from the Commonwealth purse per capita than Victoria in terms of transport needs. This is something that should be addressed quickly.

The other transport area that is a real burden and problem for the constituents of my electorate is the failure of the Commonwealth to fund proper overpass intersections, or flyovers, along the Calder Highway. We have a situation where fatalities are becoming the norm on the Calder Highway between the CBD and Sunbury. In particular, there are a number of intersections—such as Robertsons Road, Calder Park Drive and Sunshine Avenue—where major accidents are occurring. They are occurring because we have ground level intersections on a major freeway. It is not good enough for the Commonwealth to ignore the plight of the community that uses that stretch of freeway and those that live very close to the freeway who are seeking to turn onto and off the Calder Highway while going into and out of the city. It is also causing problems for people that are obviously using it as a freeway to go, for example, from Melbourne’s CBD to Bendigo. We should not have so close to the CBD ground level intersections on such a major transport route. It is unsafe and it congests traffic; it leads to all sorts of problems.

Why Gorton is alleged to be one of the unhappiest electorates is anyone’s guess. I refute that, but I can point to those deficiencies in areas of Commonwealth expenditure that certainly would not make the people that live in my neck of the woods happy. Quite seriously, I have had to speak to bereaved family members who have lost relatives as a result of the dangers that clearly continue to exist because of the ground level intersections on the freeway.

There are other comparisons that one can draw. This survey talked about the happiness of people in electorates. That is a very difficult thing to quantify or qualify. It is true that if you make comparisons between electorates you find they are very different. You have the metropolitan and regional and rural divide and you have coastal communities and communities that reside within the centre of Australia, so you have many variables with the electorates of this great country. When I look at a number of comparisons, it does concern me that there is such a gap in opportunities between constituents in one area of the country as opposed to those in other areas. I quite often say that if you look at the socioeconomic demographic of the electorate of Gorton you see it is actually quite similar—maybe without the difficulties of distance—to those in country seats.

If you look at the income levels and employment opportunities, you see their differences are not as great as one would hope they would be. For example, why is a 10-year-old in the Prime Minister’s seat four times more likely to have access to a computer at home than such a child in the electorate of Gorton? Why is a 10-year-old child in the Prime Minister’s seat four times more likely to be online and able to access the internet than such a child in the electorate of Gorton? Why is a constituent in the Prime Minister’s seat three times more likely to be undertaking postsecondary education than a constituent in Gorton? By the way, I am not only making the point of comparison between a Labor seat and a government held seat. Quite clearly, you see a big divide in many respects when you look at rural and metropolitan seats. You see seats held by Nationals, Liberals and Independents in country Australia that have inherent disadvantages above and beyond the tyranny of distance. I think it is true to say, for example, that the effects of the Work Choices legislation upon workers in country areas will be worse, relatively speaking, than—

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