Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much to the member for Paterson for her question. I was so pleased to stand with her and the member for Newcastle in Newcastle last week to announce that high-speed rail is a step closer.

Our government is now entering the development phase for a line between Newcastle and Sydney. Teams will now go metre by metre, doing the detailed planning and design work required so that we can make a final investment decision to put shovels in the ground. We will be getting early contractor involvement to make sure we have got this project right, and there are industry briefings happening in April in Newcastle. We'll be designing the tunnels, getting the design of the stations right and understanding the signalling system that is needed. This is the steady, purposeful work of getting that design right so that we can make a future investment decision with confidence that we have all of the facts on this project.

Our country is, of course, growing, and we know existing road and rail between Sydney and Newcastle is at capacity. Significant investment is going to be needed in the M1 and into rail if we do nothing because of the population growth through this fantastic part of the world. High-speed rail can absolutely be part of the solution to that. Stages 1A and 1B will be dedicated high-speed rail connecting Newcastle to central Sydney in an hour, allowing us to deliver more homes, spread jobs across the state and grow the economy of the Hunter.

One of my shadow infrastructure ministers—you may not know there are actually two. There's a National Party one and a Liberal Party one, because, I assume, they don't actually trust each other. But their latest contribution was that the Commonwealth doesn't own a bulldozer and has no constitutional authority to just rock into states and start building dams or roads or rail projects. This is true, but it is a fascinating point to make when that is exactly what those opposite did with Inland Rail. When we came to government, we discovered that this approach to building Inland Rail was frankly just to start before they'd worked out where the line would start and end. They said it would connect the ports of Melbourne and Brisbane, but they couldn't tell us how. There was no schedule nor actual plan. What happened as a result was that the costs have blown out to four to five times what they guesstimated it would cost.

We had to commission the independent Schott review to make sure that this wasn't a multimillion-dollar train to nowhere. I'm pleased that, as a result of the review, we've now turned the first sod at the Beveridge intermodal. We're prioritising building to Parkes so we can then start moving double-stack trains from Melbourne all the way to Perth. This, of course, was part of an infrastructure pipeline we inherited that was full of pet projects with no details beyond a press release. Delivering infrastructure takes time, and it takes a government that spends more time on the planning and design than it does on Sky News. That's why our government is entering this detailed planning process for high-speed rail to make it a reality.

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