Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

If there is one thing that is clear from this bill, it is that this government is very good at repealing acts, removing protections and tearing things down but, when it comes to building the public transport infrastructure that this country is going to need for the 21st century, it is missing in action. One would have expected that in one of the few significant pieces of infrastructure legislation that has come in here, the Land Transport Infrastructure Amendment Bill 2014, it would be an opportunity to respond to the fact that our cities and the greater city areas in places like Melbourne, where I come from, are groaning under the weight of a growing population without a public transport plan to meet it.

If one were to come to the eastern edge of my electorate at peak hour in the morning, as the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, invited people to do, and look down the Eastern Freeway, what they would see is cars bumper to bumper and people spending hours in traffic jams wanting to come into the city or, perhaps, to the suburbs south of the city to go to work. What you would also see as you look down the Eastern Freeway from Clifton Hill outward is a great big swathe of land down the middle—a reserve that, at the moment, is largely a green area set aside. It is a reserve going most of the length of the Eastern Freeway. That reserve was set aside some 30-odd years ago for a train line. If you go back and look in, I think, the 1979 or 1980 Melways street directory, what you see is, in fact, train stops marked out along that reserve down the middle of the Eastern Freeway. People were told at the time, 'Yes, we are going to build a freeway out there so that people who have no alternative but to drive can go to work in their cars but there will also be a train line out there.'

If you look at Perth, for example, you will see that with the freeways north up to Joondalup and south down to Mandurah they have done a very sensible thing—which is, as the freeway was being built, they put a rail line down the middle. What you find is that it takes hundreds of thousands of cars off the road each year. And it is no surprise. I have been there myself. My parents spend some time down at Mandurah, and I have driven down to visit them. As you are driving down the freeway, all of a sudden a train whizzes past and overtakes you, and you think, 'Gee, I should have been on that because that would get me to my destination quicker.' When you have those rail lines going down the middle of the freeway, you find people make the choice because people want to do the right thing if the opportunity is presented to them. People know that petrol prices are just going to go up and up, and that building more roads to cure congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity. All it means is that in another few years time those roads will be full up as well and you are going to be stuck spending hours in traffic, in the morning or in the evening, that you could be spending at home with your family. That is why, when it comes to debating land transport infrastructure, the focus needs to be not what this bill is on but on improving our public transport.

In Melbourne, greater Melbourne and Victoria at large, the situation did not get much better after 11 years of state Labor government. Despite having 11 years to build that rail line out to Doncaster, where one train would take 800 cars off the road, they did not do that either. Instead, we saw under the previous, Labor government the hatching of the plan to build more roads—the East West Link. That plan is now being brought to fruition under the state Liberal government. One would have hoped that in this bill we might have seen some greater scrutiny on how Australian taxpayers' money is being spent. But, sadly, that is not happening, because we know that the current government is prepared to take $1.5 billion from the aid budget and put it into the East West Link. What we also know from the business case—not that the government want to tell us because they are fighting tooth and nail against releasing the business case—is that, for every dollar that the Australian taxpayer puts into the East West Link in Melbourne, you are going to get 80 cents back. It is a loss-making project. The only way that you can make it, on paper, look like it will make money is by fudging the figures and by putting pressure on people to include all kinds of other external benefits to bump it up so that, at least, in some sense, it makes money.

This is going to be Victoria's next desal plant, where everyday Victorians will be paying year after year for a piece of land transport infrastructure that should not be there. The winners will be the large private consortia that are going to get their risk underwritten by the public. The losers will be the Victorian public and the Australian public if they are forced to pay for this white elephant. It is going to increase pollution at a time when we should be cutting it, and it will wreck our inner-city parkland and homes. The East West Link will destroy what is good about Melbourne. It will destroy some of the reasons that people come to visit and live in those inner-city suburbs in Melbourne.

If it is built, we can forget about that rail line out to Doncaster, because what is clear, according to reports in the media in Melbourne, is that the only way this project can be close to being viable is by taking over that middle strip of land down the Eastern Freeway and turning it into extra lanes of traffic. If the East West Link goes ahead, you can forget about public transport out to the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. That is something that I do not think people in those marginal electorates out in the east have quite had explained to them yet—that this means the end of the train line out so that you can get into the city. It is not just that the space will not be there; the money will not be there either. If we pour billions into a loss-making road project, that is money that is not there to build the rail line out to Doncaster or to build the metro that needs to be built in Melbourne.

Mr Deputy Speaker, if you have been lucky enough to travel around the world, you know you have been to a good city if you can get around without having to use a car. With the right planning, there is absolutely no reason why Melbourne or Sydney cannot be one of those cities or why Australia cannot be a world-class public transport country, but it is not in this bill. This bill does create a new capacity for a new eligible project type to allow funding of research and investigation of projects funded under the act, so you can submit innovative projects for consideration. Here is one for the government: why not put more money into public transport? Why is it that we are one of the few OECD countries that do not have a dedicated national line of funding and strategy for improving public transport in our big cities, where the majority of the population lives?

If in my state of Victoria there is a change of government at the election in November, and if the opposition climb down off the fence and agree that they will not proceed with the East West Link, then we have the possibility of saving Australian and Victorian taxpayers an enormous amount of money. I hear much said at times about the question of sovereign risk. It is said that we could not possibly rip up the contracts because that would be sovereign risk. It is not often that I would urge people to take a leaf out of the book of the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, but this is one such occasion. Over the last three years I sat in this place and watched the current Prime Minister, then opposition leader, in this parliament and everywhere else around the country saying, 'Don't sign up to any contracts or projects that depend on us putting a price on pollution, because I'm going to rip it up when we get into power.' We know that the approach of the current Prime Minister had the effect of pressing the pause button on a lot of investments in renewable energy—investments that would otherwise have created jobs and cut pollution in this country. Perhaps state Labor should do the same thing. If they made it clear now that they would not go ahead and build the East West Link in Melbourne, I predict that it would not be built, that the Premier in Victoria would not proceed with his plan to sign contracts before the state election and that we would have a very different outcome after the election.

It is disappointing that, in dealing with land transport infrastructure legislation, we have nothing about public transport before us, but it is not surprising. This bill is a reflection of how out of step this government is with what people actually want from their governments. People want a bit of long-term planning. People want Australia to become a world-class public transport country and our cities to be places that you can get around without having to have a car. People do not want their houses bulldozed simply to fund a loss-making car project. People do not want Royal Park ripped up for on- and off-ramps. People do not want inner city Melbourne to become a magnet for traffic, which is what it will be if East West goes ahead.

I pay tribute to the community groups in Melbourne who, unlike the government with this piece of legislation, understand that we need a long-term plan and that successful, productive, livable cities in the 21st century will be those that are well served by public transport. The various groups in my electorate and more broadly that are campaigning against the East West Link and for more trains to get the people from the eastern suburbs into the city know that the economics do not stack up. As good as the western side of Melbourne is—including the bit where I live—the drivers of those cars that are coming in on the Eastern Freeway do not want to go there. They do not want to go to Flemington or Footscray; they want to get into the city or the southern suburbs to go to work. The best way of cutting our pollution, reducing congestion on the roads and allowing people in Melbourne to spend more time at home with their families is to build public transport. This bill takes us in the opposite direction.

Debate interrupted.

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