Llew O'Brien (Wide Bay, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

On 17 November 2022, just after the October budget, the office of the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government told the people of Gympie and the Fraser Coast that federal funding for the Tiaro bypass was budgeted and ready to flow as Queensland achieved its agreed construction milestones.

A spokesperson for the minister, in the Maryborough Sun newspaper on 17 November, said that construction was due to start in early 2023 and was due for completion in late 2024, weather and construction conditions permitting. The minister even wrote to me on 21 November, confirming the $268.8 million dollar commitment from the federal government. Then, just six months later, in the May 2023 budget, the same minister said the Tiaro bypass was being pushed into a 90-day review.

Why did the minister commit to get the job done by the end of 2024 and then refer it to a review that could axe the program? Why hasn't the minister quarantined the four-lane Tiaro bypass from the review in the same way she has done with the Brisbane Olympics?

The Bruce Highway between Gympie and Maryborough is one of the deadliest sections of the nation's national highway, with 16 serious crashes and five fatalities so far this year. With 11,000 vehicle movements on this stretch, if this section of the national highway were in any other jurisdiction, it would already be four lanes. At the rate the federal and state Labor governments are going, all of the infrastructure for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics will be in place long before we see the Bruce Highway four-laned between Gympie and Maryborough. When will the four-lane Tiaro bypass be finished, and when will the remaining two-lane section of the highway between Gympie and Maryborough area be four-laned?

The former coalition government committed $18 million from the Community Development Grants Program fund for a water security project in Maryborough. Negotiations between Sunwater, CANEGROWERS, Rural Funds Management and the minister's department were proceeding well, right up until the federal election in May 2022, when the Australian government went into caretaker mode before the election. Following the change of government, I wrote to the Treasurer asking for the $18 million commitment to be maintained. He didn't reply to my letter, but I was heartened when Minister King said at the time of the October 2022 budget that she would honour the coalition's original funding allocation. But, in the time following, communications between the stakeholders fell silent until a bombshell revelation in Senate estimates on 23 May, when departmental official Meghan Hibbert claimed that Sunwater advised the department on 24 March that it wouldn't proceed with the grant. This conflicts with the advice from Sunwater, which claimed in a presentation to Maryborough stakeholders as recently as 30 May that it was actually the federal government which terminated the grant.

Why didn't the government allow the parties to conclude their negotiations with the department to enable the project to proceed? This is an extremely valuable project for local agriculture. Contract variations and extensions are done all the time by the department, so why didn't the minister extend the grant instead of withdrawing it, as Sunwater has alleged, and not giving more time to allow the project to be delivered? It begs the question: with the Borumba Dam pumped hydro project now proposed and with the federal government funding it, is there a relationship between that project and the starving of agriculture locally of vitally needed water?

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