Cameron Thompson (Blair, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As is my wont, from time to time I rise in this place to bring to book the crazy attitude of the Queensland state government in relation to the development of the Ipswich Motorway and its continued insistence upon a less than ideal solution to meet the road transport needs of our district. By that I mean the district from Ipswich all the way west to Toowoomba: the region that is primarily reliant on the Ipswich Motorway.

The state minister responsible for all the planning and other practical parts of the process of developing an effective solution to the problems of massive traffic on the Ipswich Motorway is none other than the main roads minister, Paul Lucas. I would like to alert members to the fact that, immediately after the last election, on Saturday, 27 November 2004, Paul Lucas, the state Minister for Transport and Main Roads, made a joint press release with our own minister, the Minister for Local Government, Territories and Roads, Jim Lloyd. He made some comments that I want to draw to the attention of the House. To quote from the press release they put out:

Paul Lucas said Queensland welcomed the appointment of respected engineering firm Maunsell Australia to independently evaluate the proposed Ipswich northern bypass.

The northern bypass is another name for the Goodna bypass, which is the long-term solution to the problems of the Ipswich Motorway, planned and proposed by the Commonwealth. Mr Lucas went on:

The Queensland Government will do all in its power to cooperate with the Federal Government in delivering their roads priorities, including the northern bypass.

The simple fact is that the Australian Government is providing the money for the national highway and they decide how their money is spent.

…     …         …

If the feasibility study—

that is, the Maunsell feasibility study—

indicates the northern bypass is not a viable project, Queensland and the Commonwealth will need to look again at how we address traffic congestion on the Ipswich Motorway.

I bring that to the attention of the House because, of course, the Maunsell study did proceed. It was a feasibility study conducted by Maunsell; it was not a comparison between the bypass and the thing that Mr Lucas keeps hankering after—that is, the coordinated destruction and reconstruction of the existing Ipswich Motorway. That feasibility study of the Goodna bypass found that there were three feasible options, three potential ways the Commonwealth could build the proposed Goodna bypass, so of course it found that the northern bypass was feasible. In line with Mr Lucas’s comments in his press release, you would expect therefore that the state government would proceed to give the Commonwealth government the support that he spoke about and to expedite the further construction, planning and completion of the Goodna bypass.

That is not what happened. Unfortunately the state government has spent an awful lot of time after that trying to re-present its argument to tear down the existing road while motorists are trying to drive on it and to construct in its place a six-lane upgrade which would be deficient compared to the Goodna bypass in terms of its traffic-carrying capacity. In fact, Mr Lucas has been quite strident about this and he has got a bit ratty at times. In a letter he wrote to me, he wrote down the bottom in a kind of rambling rant:

Cameron, The problem for you—

and this is in his handwriting—

is that the joint state-federal study commissioned & undertaken by Maunsells shows the ½ northern bypass is not the best option. Yet you choose to ignore this. Stop playing politics ...

I was not the one who got on the back of a truck with Jim Lloyd and said that he was going to assist the federal government in ‘delivering their roads priorities, including the northern bypass’. Those were the words of Mr Lucas himself, yet he reneged on that and then had the hide to accuse me of playing politics!

For the record, I want to speak a little bit about what the Maunsell report did find. It did find that the northern option—or Goodna bypass, constructed to bypass the corridor of the Ipswich Motorway—would be ‘greatly beneficial to through traffic, relieving congestion on the existing motorway and enabling both routes to offer a reasonable level of service’. That was on page 39 of the Maunsell report. It also found:

A further potential safety benefit of constructing a road bypassing this section of Ipswich Motorway comes from the opportunities to divert traffic during major incidents blocking either road.

That was on page 55. It found that forecast speed on that northern option from 2012 right through to 2032 would be a high speed of between 93 and 97 kilometres an hour. Forecast speeds on the existing motorway would deteriorate from 61 to 35 kilometres an hour—that is if nothing is done—but remain above 85 kilometres an hour if the northern option is built. That is on page 39 of the Maunsell report.

Further, it found the provision of the northern option ‘would have the effect of substantially reducing traffic flows on the existing motorway, improving the level of service and reducing the incidence of accidents’. That is on page 54. ‘Traffic on the existing motorway over the Dinmore to Gailes section would be reduced to about 40,000 vehicles a day in the year of commissioning the IMNO’—the northern option, that is—‘which would rise to about 58,000 vehicles a day in 2032’. That is on page 29.

So quite clearly the report found it to be eminently viable and found it to be a good project with very long-term consequences, being able to deal with the volume of traffic through our area through to 2032—something, unfortunately, the prescription of the state main roads minister just cannot do. Unfortunately, not only would the state proposal for a six-lane upgrade inconvenience everyone when the road is dug up while people try and drive on it for the next five or six years but, on top of that, once it was completed, it would certainly within two, three or maybe five years at the best be subject to the same levels of congestion that we currently experience. That is just a pathetic outcome for an organisation that is supposed to pride itself on planning main roads. Planning a road for maximum traffic disruption and then congestion is something that the Three Stooges might specialise in, but it certainly should not be the aspiration of the state main roads minister, and at the moment I am not sure if he is Larry, Curly or Moe.

On the other side of things, I thought I should report on what Maunsell had to say. They did a separate analysis of Larry, Curly and Moe’s efforts for the upgrade project. They found that the state main roads department had come up with an idea where they could do the whole upgrade in something like three years. Maunsell looked at this in a special report, which was only about eight pages long. On page 1 they said: ‘Amazing! The state government, in their plan to upgrade the Ipswich Motorway, has not allowed a single day for wet weather.’ In a three-year construction schedule, they did not allow a single day for wet weather, and it turns out that a normal type of allocation for a three-year construction period would be six months. That shows you the level of chicanery we are getting here from the state government. That is the first point.

Secondly, it found, as it says on page 8:

Time allowances for bridge construction are considered generally to be extremely tight.

Cop this: according to the state main roads department they can build an overpass—rail bridges passing over Warrego Highway, passing over the railway line—in one month. They can build a concrete overpass in one month. Currently they are down there working on the Granard Road overpass and they have been there for years and years. In fact, money for the Granard Road overpass was allocated in 2001 and they still have not completed it. This same mob reckon they can build an overpass in one month just for the sake of conning the motorists and the federal government into accepting their cockamamie scam where they say that they can produce this whole thing in three years. There are other overpasses they say they could build in four months. There is another one they said they can build in seven months and another one they could build in five months—all of which, Maunsell said, were extremely tight. I think they are being very careful in their wording not to overinflate it, but quite obviously it is bunkum. The whole plan is bunkum and it is typical of the kind of con we have had from Paul Lucas ever since he made that ridiculous statement that he was going to get behind the Commonwealth and do what he is actually required to do.

Other things that Maunsell found about his scheme was that basically it is a danger to the workers who would be required to work on it. They were proposing island worksites between live traffic. They found that the worksites would be ‘of a narrow width and a long linear length, making those multiple work fronts more difficult, and such aspects may result in significantly reduced productivity and progress within each stage than might normally be expected, leading to the need for longer construction program allowances’. We have had our leg pulled every day of the week by Paul Lucas in relation to the Ipswich Motorway. What the Ipswich people need is the Goodna bypass so we can build the road off-line, so we can build it on a greenfield site and so that traffic can continue on the Ipswich Motorway uninterrupted. (Time expired)