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

It's always a pleasure to follow my friend, the member for Spence. I'm going to speak on this issue, firstly, as the member for Groom. Probably the city that is most impacted by this decision of this Labor government is Toowoomba. The benefit that we could have reaped from this project was huge.

I'm also going to make a few comments, as someone who's had the pleasure of delivering three major rail projects around the world and has seen the challenges involved in delivering those, and make some reflections on this. One of the reasons I want to do that is to acknowledge the work of the member for Riverina. Do you know what? It's really easy to walk away from a challenge. It's really easy to give up on a project. I have seen rail projects delivered around the world. I think about the Edinburgh light rail. If you want to see a project that had trouble, google Edinburgh light rail. It shut down Edinburgh for 18 months. No-one liked it. It was a dog's breakfast. It was a horrible thing. It blew out; the time blew out. It is now the most used light rail in Europe and beloved by the city. It does a great job. They pushed through. They had incredible challenges, but they pushed through. I want to thank the member for Riverina for his work stewarding the project. It's a difficult thing to do. Instead of running away, instead of giving up and instead of lying to the Australian people and saying they were going to deliver it and then walking out, he did the hard work of trying to get this thing to work, and I thank him for that.

This project started with a promise. It started with a promise of something that we've been looking forward to in Toowoomba for over 100 years. I've got a book on Littleton Groom's speeches in this place. In the 1930s—1932—he started talking about inland rail. Of course, the Second World War took it off the infrastructure priority list at the time, and it fell away. But we saw the opportunity to connect the Darling Downs up with the southern states. That was the driving force. The first idea behind it was from men like Littleton Groom, who saw that opportunity and pursued it. So we've been talking about this for a long time.

In, I think, about 2017—the member for Riverina may remember this better than me—we started looking at exactly how we'd bring this into Toowoomba, how we'd get the most benefit for Toowoomba and for the entire Darling Downs and for Queensland to be able to have that southern link feeding down into the Port of Melbourne. There was so much work that went into that. We can talk about the Wagners out at Wellcamp and the preparations they took there, but I'm going to focus on the people at InterLinkSQ. This is a business who established a block of land for an intermodal hub, and it's right on the western line, where the Queensland rail line runs east to west, from Brisbane all the way to the far border. There's a little nook in there where Inland Rail was going to come in, and they got that piece of land. When we left office in May 2022, we had a contract signed to begin works from the border to Gowrie, which was up to that little point at that node. We had that contract signed. Work was ready to go.

On the basis of that, InterLinkSQ have invested $50 million of their own money, private money, developing that land. You can go there today and you can see it's been levelled out. They've moved massive drainage pipes that were through there. They've established road networks into it. It is perfectly laid out to be the intermodal hub that would have really driven a large part of Toowoomba's future economy. In that time, I have written to the minister 31 times, asking, 'Is this going to be delivered, and when?' And, every time, the answer was, 'Yes, it will be delivered.' I wrote six separate letters to the Prime Minister and to the minister. 'Is this going to be delivered?' 'Yes.' Those letters gave confidence to my community, and that $50 million was invested. That's just one company I'm talking about who made these investments on the back of promises from this government that have turned out to be absolutely worthless.

I am furious. I've been here five years. I have sat at the door and on the kitchen table of everyone who's raised concerns about this project, right along the line. I have spoken to them. I've made sure that they've been dealt with properly by ARTC in some cases where they weren't. I have raised every issue that I could with the government of the day and with ARTC to make sure that we got everything lined up as best we could. Every step of the way, up until a couple of weeks ago, this government promised, like the member for Blair said earlier, that they would fix this project, and we made those investments. Mr Albanese lied to us. He lied to our community, and he's taken a huge chunk of our future away from us.

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