Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This afternoon I would like to talk about what I believe is a terrible mistake my government is making, and it involves what is known as the Moorebank intermodal. I believe that, when history is recorded, this will go down as a classic example of governments picking winners but only ending up picking losers.

By way of background, we must try to work out the most efficient ways to get freight around the city of Sydney. If we look historically, Sydney port was where all of the freight came in. Today, what was down at the container terminal at Sydney port is now Barangaroo, an international tourist attraction. That was from where the freight container handling capacity of Sydney was relocated to Port Botany. The problem that Sydney has had is, as the city has grown, the demographic heart of Sydney has moved further west, so the goods that arrive from overseas in shipping containers have to be transported from Port Botany to further out west. For a lot of the land around the Port Botany area, which was traditionally used as warehousing, the cost has increased so substantially in price that it is now prohibitive for most importers of consumer goods to be located nearby the port. They have had to relocate further out in Western Sydney.

In the past, it would have been a simple matter of the container ship coming in and the containers being lifted off the back of the container, put onto the deck, then lifted up off the deck and put onto the stack. A truck would come in, the container would be taken from the stack to the back of the truck and it would go off to the warehouse. Using an intermodal is actually a form of double handling, because it puts another lift process in the distribution chain. Where the container goes from the port, instead of going on the back of a truck it goes on the back of a train. It then gets taken out to Western Sydney where it then gets lifted off that train, put onto a truck and then taken to the location of where the container needs to go. So, to start with, it is a double handling. For an intermodal concept to actually work, you need to move the container far enough by rail so that you pick up the savings in road versus rail to offset those double handling costs.

This is where Moorebank was a failed idea from the very start. Firstly, anyone looking at this situation about where an intermodal should be located and if one was actually needed—I make the point of whether if one is actually needed is still an issue that has not even been determined by the market—almost a decade ago now a proposal was made to build an intermodal hub at Enfield. This was only about 25 kilometres away from Port Botany, or 25 minutes by road. What happened was that Infrastructure New South Wales—no less an authority than Infrastructure New South Wales—stated that Enfield would provide the test case if short-haul intermodal in Sydney would be commercially viable. The Enfield intermodal is now three years overdue from opening. The operator that was originally going to take it has pulled out. They are no longer prepared to run it because they do not think they can make it commercially viable. This should ring warning bells on the failure of what we do.

It was interesting when we had a meeting here in Parliament House with some of the people from the government bureaucracy, the Department of Infrastructure, who are promoting the Moorebank intermodal. I said to them, 'Enfield is not being accepted by the market. Why then would Moorebank be successful if Enfield is not successful, given that Enfield has been described as the test case?' They said that Enfield did not work because it was too close to Port Botany. This shows how they have it completely wrong. Although the distance from Port Botany to Enfield is closer than the distance from Port Botany to Moorebank as the crow flies, in logistics it is not the distance as the crow flies but the time that you take to travel. Whether by truck or by car, the time that it takes you to get from Port Botany to Enfield as compared to the time it takes you to get from Port Botany to Moorebank, is virtually the same. Anyone can do that test on Google Maps and see that it is virtually the same. Simply, there are no savings—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Proceedings suspended from 17 : 29 to 17 : 34

Going back to what I was saying before the suspension, if we are going to have an intermodal in Sydney even though the test case of Enfield has failed, where should it be? The first thing you would do is look at where the containers are actually going to from Port Botany at the moment. If you do that analysis it is very clear: the area where the most containers are being delivered from Port Botany into Western Sydney is Eastern Creek, which is one of the areas that one of the earlier studies identified as the most suitable location. But somewhere along the line Moorebank came up as a supposedly cheaper option.

I will run through what that the cheaper option is actually going to cost. We have had to relocate the School of Military Engineering. It is wonderful that we have a new School of Military Engineering, but we had an existing school which will be completely bulldozed and demolished. So what value we have added by building that new School of Military Engineering when we already had an existing one is very debatable. For that we spent close to $970 million. That was the first cost. The second cost we have is to clear and rehabilitate the land on the School of Military Engineering site. That is another $100 million cost to the government. Third, if Moorebank were ever going to be successful it would require a major upgrade of all the road networks surrounding it, especially and including an on-ramp onto the M5 and another crossing over the Georges River. This is estimated at costs of upwards of another $750 million. So by the time it is all finished this so-called cheaper option will have cost the taxpayer $2 billion in costs, yet we are getting a second-rate proposal.

Also we have three completely false concepts that this intermodal is built around. The second of these is that it will take trucks off the road. All it actually does is relocate where the trucks depart from. Instead of the trucks departing from Port Botany they will now depart from Moorebank, and Moorebank is an area of more congestion than is already around Port Botany. Moorebank being so far to the south-west of Sydney and not being centrally located will actually result in more trucks and more traffic on roads. A study was done by a company called Transport Modelling where they looked at a typical importer of consumer goods that would distribute those goods to retail shopping centres around New South Wales. They found that if an importer moved down to Moorebank from Eastern Creek, Wetherill Park or the Chullora area it would have its trucks on the road up to 10 per cent more. So by relocating to Moorebank we are putting more trucks on the road.

The other issue of course is air pollution. The argument was that this would reduce air pollution. There is some truth in that—or partial truth. If you are moving goods by rail as compared to road, you use half as much diesel fuel. But the problem is that a train spews out 18 times more particulate matter per litre of diesel fuel burnt than a truck does. That is almost a nine times increase in particulate matter spewed out in Western Sydney. We must remember that the World Health Organization has classified particulate matter as a carcinogen. We already have levels of particulate matter in Western Sydney right on the threshold of the recommended levels of the World Health Organization, so we should be doing everything we can to reduce those levels of particulate matter in Western Sydney. Yet here we are with a proposal that will bring a ninefold increase from every single container moved via rail rather than road. This is a project that needs a serious second look.

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