Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Energy Security and Affordability) Share this | Hansard source

I'm going to start with an apology to the member for Riverina. When I came into this place in 2020, he was the infrastructure minister at the time, and I was very hard on him. I was very hard, as a local member looking after my community that had Inland Rail running through it. We all saw the benefits, but it's difficult to deliver big infrastructure. I see the member for Blair, and he has equally raised the concerns of his community in the Lockyer Valley, and that's been important because local communities need to be represented when we deliver these big projects. They impact us. The impact is not just local; it benefits the whole nation. That's what nation-building infrastructure is about.

I pushed the minister of the time hard and I said some things that I probably should have considered a bit more deeply, but at no stage was there ever any doubt that it was our intention to deliver Inland Rail, to overcome the challenges, to work through them with our local communities and to spend the time that it took to get that job done. That was important to me because Inland Rail has been a dream for Toowoomba for some time. It was back in the 1930s that Littleton Groom, one of my predecessors in the role, after whom the seat is now named, first started talking about an inland rail coming up through to Toowoomba and connecting us with Melbourne. Of course, the war got in the way, but subsequent members have talked about it, and, under Ian MacFarlane, we started to get this thing going in consultation and working with the Labor government of the day. John McVeigh played a huge role in getting the project through, and I think about the work that was done in getting the project aligned with the Wellcamp airport.

We have three major highways running through Toowoomba—the Warrego, the Gore and the New England—and, at each of those intersections, we started planning for Inland Rail. We had the Second Range Crossing come through—a $1.2 billion injection of infrastructure into our region that was lined up so that, when the Inland Rail came through, we'd have a great trucking route that would access the highways, to enable us to move freight from rail to road easily. We made that investment. I think of places like InterLinkSQ. This is an investment that's been made right on the connection between the east-west rail line that Queensland Rail own, and Inland Rail was going to intersect with it. They've invested more than $50 million of private money into preparing that site for Inland Rail. In the same area, there were grants given by local, state and federal governments of both sides over the past 10 years. The Labor government in Queensland contributed to that as well. And we got ready for it. We saw, at the 2022 election, a change of government, and the Prime Minister promised my electorate that this project would be delivered, that Inland Rail would be delivered. They said they needed to fix it, but they would deliver it, and at a no stage was there any suggestion this project would be cut short.

When questions were raised about the cost of the project, I pointed out multiple times that the opportunity was there to pause the project at Toowoomba, where you would get 90 per cent of the benefits of the project, that most of the cost is between Toowoomba and Brisbane and that that's where most of the challenges, as raised by the member for Blair, come through. I made that suggestion, and I put it through many, many times. It was an important piece of discussion. I sent 31 questions in writing to the minister during the last four years, asking when this project is going to be delivered, when we will start seeing works and what things are holding it back. At no stage, in any of the 31 answers I got, was there ever a suggestion that this project would get cancelled. I wrote six letters to the Prime Minister. At no stage in their response did they suggest that this project was going to get cancelled. After all of that, here we are. This is a project that Toowoomba has been waiting for, has invested in and has built its future around. It was promised that it would come to us. The Prime Minister has just canned it and walked away. He didn't consult with us. He didn't talk to anyone who'd invested money in the project. He didn't talk to anyone locally. There was no consultation. He just canned it and walked away. We've heard some wonderful speeches here, all talking about the wonderful things Labor does. No-one on the Labor side has acknowledged that Toowoomba has invested significantly in this project based on the promises made by this Prime Minister that he has now broken.

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