Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a delight to be able to speak before you, Mr Deputy Speaker Quick. The independence of the chair is absolutely assured; there is no doubt. The member for Tangney has explained the situation very well so that even I, a Queenslander, can understand and visualise the sorts of problems that obviously he and the member for Canning are far more intimately aware of. I think he has done a great service to the parliament with regard to The great freight task report that we are considering.

I want to congratulate the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services on the clarity they have brought to the issues in my electorate of Moreton. The Acacia Ridge intermodal terminal is mainly contained within my electorate, and I am greatly indebted to the committee for flushing out something that the Queensland government simply will not fess up to—that is, that the Queensland Rail controlled facility located 15 kilometres from the Brisbane CBD has, according to this report, some 380,000 TEUs, which, essentially, are 20-foot or longer containers, passing through it each year. The thing that frustrates me—and people in this place have heard me talk about this so many times over the years, and we are getting progress—is that the Howard government, under Auslink, had to negotiate contractual access to the Brisbane-Sydney rail freight line, owned and operated by Queensland Rail. It is amazing, isn’t it, that we had to negotiate to get access to a railway line 100 or so kilometres from the New South Wales border to the Acacia Ridge rail freight terminal? The QR freight terminal at Acacia Ridge then unpacks the trains and puts the goods on the backs of trucks, which then rat run through my electorate, down McCullough Street in the main these days. McCullough Street is now reporting about an 80 per cent increase in the number of trucks. People in my area are being confronted by trucks, authorised by the Queensland government to rat run down that road to get on to the Gateway motorway to go to the port of Brisbane, where the other great intermodal terminal referred to in this particular report is located.

From 1993 to 1996 the Keating government had a program called One Nation. That program was about building a stronger rail network in certain areas. For the first time ever in history a standard gauge rail line was built from Acacia Ridge rail freight terminal to the Port of Brisbane, running mainly through the member for Griffith’s electorate—and I do not mean any disservice to him by that observation. But if I ever see a train on that line, I will give somebody $100, because they have to negotiate the signalling systems of the Queensland Rail Gold Coast line which runs right through my electorate. In other words, the passengers get the priority, which is exactly what the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services is outlining as a fundamental farce in the way our rail freight and intermodal systems are operating.

To sum up: people in my electorate get B-double trucks and 380,000 20-foot containers a year thundering through suburbs, past people’s letterboxes, instead of going down Beaudesert Road and onto the Logan Motorway—the only toll road in the whole state of Queensland. QR refuses to pay a toll to its own government, so it sends all its trucks thundering through my electorate.

I welcome this report because it brings some clarity to the argument. It also highlights the folly of the federal Labor Party’s policy to build a $300 million priority road for trucks through my electorate. They want to extend the Ipswich Motorway onto the Kessels Road corridor and turn it into a Kessels highway—a six-lane extension of the Ipswich Motorway, giving a green light to interstate trucks, while local residents have to wait for the trucks to pass. That is the plan they have for the corner of Kessels Road and Mains Road. It shows the folly which it is. The report also outlines the plans of the Beaudesert Shire Council to move some of that intermodal work to Bromelton, about 50 kilometres south of Acacia Ridge. But either way, if we make better use of rail and actually bring the trains all the way to, say, the Port of Brisbane, you could have a dry port in Brisbane, where the movement of containers could be undertaken in one spot—the Port of Brisbane. You could have road, rail and sea all co-located in one spot. The basic infrastructure is there, but instead we have a lazy approach, a lack of planning, which simply means local residents in my electorate have to suffer as the trucks go by.

Finally, the scariest part of this report is that it forecasts a seven to 10 per cent increase in the number of trucks that will come out of Acacia Ridge. According to this report, King & Co. may have said that Acacia Ridge’s future is constrained by the fact there are so many residential communities nearby, but the point I make is that residents in my electorate are suffering every day—24 hours a day, seven days a week—because of the lack of planning by the Queensland government with regard to the rail freight task. I commend the report to the House.

Debate (on motion by Mr Somlyay) adjourned.

See this speech in context