Stewart McArthur (Corangamite, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to make a contribution on The great freight task report. In opening my remarks I would like to thank the chair, the member for Hinkler, and other committee members. I commend the chairman for his conscientious attendance at the meetings and an outstanding report. I also thank Mr Tas Luttrell, who was the secretary to the committee. This is a landmark report. It will act as a benchmark for transport in Australia, be it road, rail or sea.

Fundamentally, the initial task of this committee was to investigate the connection between the ports and other modes of transport. However, the committee in its deliberations and its inspections of ports all around Australia developed some other aspects of the report. The evaluation of the road freight task, the rail freight task, the intermodal activity plus the operation of the ports around the eastern seaboard and Western Australia is to be commended in terms of what the committee observed and some of the recommendations.

Obviously the fundamental task facing Australia is the doubling of the freight tonnage by 2020. Everyone in this parliament should be aware that freight movements in Australia in a very short period of time will double so that we will need better roads, better trucks and a better railway system. Of course, the sea trade for exports and imports will need to be improved, as will the operation of our port structure.

In the time available I want to refer to some aspects of the report that I have some interest in. As members would be aware, I have had an interest in the rail systems of Australia, having participated in the Tracking Australia report. I have had an ongoing interest in making sure that the rail task is improved, that railway systems do reach the 21st century and that they make a contribution to the moving of freight, both internally and for export.

I will deal with some of the aspects in the report. Looking at the containers, which are moving in both the export trade and internally, I will deal with some of the observations that there are increasing numbers of containers being used, there is a growing proportion of 40-foot containers replacing the 20-foot size and there is a need to move double stacked containers along rail routes. Those observations cover an enormous number of problems. If you go to the urban areas of Australia, you see different types of containers, but I am delighted that in fact there is a movement to the bigger container, compatible with international trade.

I was part of the inspection of the Port of Melbourne. It is worth noting that the Port of Melbourne is Australia’s biggest container and general cargo port. It handles 39 per cent of Australia’s container trade, amounting to 1.7 million TEUs in 2003-04. Melbourne acts as a natural cargo hub. That is a pretty important feature of the Port of Melbourne. Obviously other ports around Australia do play a very important role. It is worth noting that the committee were briefed on the problem of the channel dredging. We note in the report:

The port management has plans to dredge the channel to 14 metres. This measure is necessary because 30 per cent of the visiting container ships cannot enter or leave the port fully laden.

That fact is of critical importance. As container ships become bigger, obviously the Melbourne port will have less accessibility, so it is fundamentally important for both Victoria and Australia that that dredging operation is completed. I understand the political sensitivities of environmental concerns and the politics of the people who live around Port Phillip Bay, but in the longer term we need to ensure that that dredging is completed and that the Melbourne port continues to play its pre-eminent role in access for containers into Australia.

Some of the issues that the committee looked at with regard to port access included: the channel dredging in Melbourne, as I have mentioned; the removal of curfew restrictions at Port Kembla, which I visited; the rail connection of Web Dock to Melbourne; the review of the capacity of West Gate Bridge; the dock line in Melbourne; the reinstatement of the standard gauge link between Mount Gambier and Portland, which the committee had a good look at; and the overpass at Wellington Road at Portland. There is a great list of other quite significant changes that would add to the efficiency of rail access to ports, particularly on the eastern seaboard.

Looking at the rail network, there is a very good summary in the report on the problems facing rail operators, particularly with regard to access difficulty. I note the problems identified in the report. The committee looked at some of the problems regarding access to Sydney from the south, north and west. Historically, the committee are very aware of that access through both the geography of Sydney and the problem of making access to the port through the metropolitan area. Regarding the line from the Queensland border to Brisbane, again the geography is difficult for that particular proposition. Regarding the southern Sydney freight line, it is very important that we can have a single, special purpose freight line through Sydney rather than it being committed to the domination by the passenger lines in the Sydney orbit. The committee had a good look at the problem of the Hunter Valley coal chain, and I think some good work has been done by ARTC in improving that. That is a pretty good system compared to world standards, but obviously improvements could be undertaken. Regarding missing rail links in the Hunter Valley, some of the crucial parts of the Hunter Valley rail link could be improved. Those of us who have been interested in the issue of the line through or around the Toowoomba ranges know that that is a major impediment for the Brisbane to Melbourne line. Regarding the missing rail links in Queensland coalfields, with massive exports of coal, we need to ensure that in 2007 we can do it efficiently. And there is the rail connectivity in Victoria and across the South Australian border. Some of those issues identified problems that the committee found in the rail area.

I would just like to quote Mr Vince O’Rourke, who is a very well known and very well respected railway man—a former head of Queensland Rail. He put a most interesting proposition to the committee in terms of the Melbourne-Brisbane link. I think his quote is fantastic. It says what the parliament and governments of all political colours should be thinking about in the future:

Regarding the Melbourne to Brisbane railway line proposal … let us build a new railway line, and a decent one. This is a position I was advocating when I was in QR. Why don’t we do something that the rest of the world does? …We see modern freight trains and passenger trains throughout Europe and the great railways of North America. …We will patch up another railway and think we are doing pretty good to get along at 80 kilometres per hour when we should be thinking about freight trains that will travel up to 160 kilometres per hour, which happens in other parts of the world.

We are suggesting that we should build a modern railway between Melbourne and Brisbane on the shortest corridor of about 1,600 to 1,650 kilometres, west of the Great Dividing Range on the flat country with very low gradients, that it should cater for high speed freight trains up to 160 kilometres per hour and double-stack trains travelling at up to 120 kilometres per hour. It should have the capacity for fast tilting trains that would run between Melbourne and Brisbane and probably more importantly that would service the regional areas of southern Queensland and northern Victoria.

In philosophic terms, that encapsulates the thinking of the committee—that we should really try very hard to improve the rail system. We should invest some capital, both private and government money, to look very carefully at that inland route, but more importantly we should have a railway system that works, is modern and can reach those higher speeds.

One of the debates that the committee had was the significance of intermodal terminals, and there has been a lot of debate on this subject amongst transport operators on the seaboard and inland. On intermodal terminals, the report says:

The intermodal sector consists of two subsystems; one servicing import and export (port oriented) movements and the other supporting interstate freight movements. In many ways these operations are independent of each other, but some terminals cater to both port-oriented and domestic movements.

This debate about the operation of intermodal terminals has been going on for some time. There is a strong argument that freight and containers should be moved from the ports to an intermodal terminal and then distributed around the areas of population. It is interesting to note that most of the containers coming into Sydney are distributed in about a 35-kilometre area, so there is a tendency to use road transport. Those other containers are being encouraged to go to intermodal terminals where they can be distributed in an efficient manner.

The debate is ongoing, and various proponents of Parkes, west of Sydney, are suggesting that intermodal operations are the way to go. That debate is yet to be concluded, and it is a matter of logistics and the use of modern technology. In Melbourne, the Somerton intermodal operation is showing great promise in view of its proximity to the port and its proximity to the national standard gauge.

In conclusion, some of us have had a longstanding interest in freight operations. It is not an issue that excites interest in the parliament but, in the long run, the standard of living of Australians will depend very much on the ability of freight to be moved efficiently across this broad continent. The movement of freight from Western Australia to the eastern seaboard is now done about 80 per cent on rail, which is a very big change from what was done historically.

The development of the Australian Rail Track Corporation has been a wonderful step in the right direction. Mr David Marchant, who is the managing director of that operation, has proved the theoretical concepts that rail can operate an efficient track system and that independent operators can move on that track system at a profit. This has been a major change in policy position—that, in Australia, where we have had three different gauges going back to the turn of the century, we now have a standard gauge going from Brisbane to Perth, and this is being improved all the time. So there is great hope that this parliament and state parliaments can move in the right direction to inject some funds into the port and rail facilities. There is also hope from the ongoing injection of funds into the national highway system. There is always great debate on the way in which we inject funds into the road network: is it done on political grounds or is it done on the rational grounds of improving the national freight task?

I commend the report. I have been delighted to participate in these deliberations. I also commend the photograph on the front of the report, which depicts the fundamental argument that some of the freight now moved by road could be placed in the top of a flat-top rail wagon; it shows what could be done at container ports. I hope that the report stands the test of time and that it will be used as a reference work for those who are interested in these important activities of shifting freight through our ports, shifting freight internally and, of course, exporting all those important goods and services that we export around the world. I commend the report.

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This report of the House of Representatives Transport and Regional Services Committee inquiry into the integration of regional road and rail networks and their interface with the ports highlights areas of critical need in our transport infrastructure and very carefully documents what is required at each of the various ports to increase capacity, which is a very important aspect of keeping up with the demands of freight in Australia. Having said that, I will be focusing on the port of Fremantle, which is my local port. What is very interesting—and this is something this report highlighted is at just about every single port that we visited—is that, when major cities and regional centres in Australia are building roads and ring-roads to protect suburbs and towns from heavy traffic, heavy through-traffic and road freight, the Western Australian Labor government has been dismantling crucial components of the Metropolitan Region Scheme. This is a magnificent forward-thinking plan for the future growth and transport network needs for the south metropolitan region well into the 21st century. This is a plan that has been in place for over 40 years.

The components of the scheme were the Fremantle Eastern Bypass and the final stage of the Roe Highway—stage 8. The Roe Highway road reserve was first set aside in the Metropolitan Region Scheme in 1963 and it forms part of the ring-road system which surrounds the Perth metropolitan region. More than 40 years of planning of a sustainable transport network has now been absolutely destroyed by the Gallop and Carpenter Labor governments. Why? To serve the short-term political gain and self-interest of Labor MPs.

The alignment of Roe Highway stage 8 was to have run from the Kwinana Freeway to the Fremantle Eastern Bypass, allowing a controlled, purpose-built transport road to the port of Fremantle. I say ‘was to have run’ because the Fremantle Eastern Bypass has been deleted from the Metropolitan Region Scheme by a Labor government which saw no use for an essential integrated transport system. This action flies in the face of the assistance that AusLink was to give the states.

The state Labor government’s decision to delete the Fremantle Eastern Bypass and not complete stage 8 of the Roe Highway effectively destroyed a safe and efficient route for freight and traffic. This has resulted in the ever-increasing lethal mix of commuter traffic and heavy freight on the major highways running through my electorate of Tangney, which is mainly residential with schools, colleges, Murdoch University, retirement villages, a major hospital campus, hospice and shopping centres.

The increases in freight vehicles and other traffic also negatively impacts on the electorate of the federal Labor member for Fremantle, who conveniently forgot to represent her constituents who wanted to retain the Fremantle Eastern Bypass.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is that why she is retiring?

Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It could be. The majority of Fremantle residents wanted the Fremantle Eastern Bypass built for their own safety and for relief from the freight vehicles that are increasingly invading their streets. However, the member for Fremantle did remember that her state Labor crony Jim McGinty had promised 100-odd voters that he would make their properties more valuable by deleting a crucial road reserve. So much for the one-vote, one-value champion! Thousands want the bypass built—hundreds do not—but Labor does not care.

This politically motivated decision was rationalised with junk planning. You know that I am incensed by junk science; the Labor Party have discovered junk planning. They replaced a brilliant and successful transport network system with a six-point plan. Labor seem to love these six-point plans. Have a look through their documents; there are six-point plans everywhere. What was this plan? The big solution, point 1, was to put more freight on rail. Labor’s promise was that 30 per cent of freight would be on rail by 2006. Halfway through 2007, what do we have? Around five per cent to six per cent. Great planning!

To achieve Labor’s target, you would have to run 600-metre-long double-stacked container trains at least three times a day through the heritage and tourism precincts of Fremantle. It would take about 15 minutes for each train to get through level crossings. But McGinty’s few voters are happy. They do not live anywhere near the noise and delays. Here is the kicker: even if the government put 30 per cent of freight on rail, what would happen to the other 70 per cent? Do Alannah MacTiernan and her Labor government expect it to levitate over residential areas, schools, universities and hospitals? Of course, it was the Lawrence government that deleted it in 1992, and a Liberal government had to clean up the mess in 1994. Even in those days, Labor ignored expert advice and community needs.

The planning department, Main Roads, Fremantle port authority and surrounding councils strongly recommended the retention of the Fremantle Eastern Bypass. This was in addition to independent consultations and over 1,000 submissions from the public calling for the retention of the bypass. History repeated itself in 2004 when the Gallop government deleted the Fremantle Eastern Bypass, yet again, knowing that the need for the FEB was demonstrably greater. The unpredicted growth in Spearwood and the industrial areas in Cockburn, Canning Vale and Welshpool made the need for the completion of the ring-road blindingly obvious. The government’s own consultants had advised against the dismantling of the thoroughly planned integrated transport route. Labor ignored the results of its own consultation process and a record 8,290 submissions received from people and businesses that strongly objected to the deletion of the Fremantle Eastern Bypass. Submissions came from as far away as the Port of Albany in the south. The significance of the freight route to the port of Fremantle was clearly appreciated state wide. Even as late as 1997, the Main Roads report on the Fremantle Eastern Bypass stated that it would provide a vital link in the integrated transport network and that it would remove through-traffic and heavy vehicles from Fremantle streets, with accidents on Hampton Road predicted to fall by as much as 50 per cent. But Labor did not care.

The Labor government’s consultants, Sinclair Knight Merz, clearly stated that the FEB and Roe Highway stage 8 were integral components of the freight network—something the majority of residents, transport companies and the TWU had been telling the Labor government free of charge. Did the queen of controlled community consultation, Alannah MacTiernan, listen? No. She rejected the advice of her own department’s consultants and that of the people directly impacted by the cynical and politically motivated decision. The report made a mockery of the WA Labor government’s six-point plan, touted as the alternative to the ring-road. The minister wanted the report rewritten because it did not suit her politically motivated and antiplanning purposes. In order to deal with the pesky objections that were still coming out loudly and clearly from betrayed communities across three councils—Canning and Melville in my electorate and Fremantle in the member for Fremantle’s electorate—the farce called the Local Impacts Committee was formed by Alannah MacTiernan, minister for misrepresentation and misinformation, and chaired by the disgraced former minister Tony McRae.

McRae did not even care about his electorate of Riverton because he does not even live there. He even privately admitted that the bypass of Roe Highway stage 8 should be built. The Local Impacts Committee comprised Labor government MPs, members of MacTiernan’s Department of Planning and Infrastructure, and Main Roads Western Australia. They had to compromise their professional integrity by toeing the party line to keep their jobs. They had seen what happened to the engineers who had expressed opposing views to the minister’s intentions. Representatives from the City of Melville and the City of Canning were hopelessly and purposefully outnumbered so that the chair did not have to worry about their votes. These are the council areas through which we are getting this massive build-up of traffic. The state Labor government has spent $32 million on the rail loop at the port. More than half of that amount was Commonwealth funding. It is still only taking about five to six per cent of the freight.

With Fremantle Ports planning to deepen the harbour and expecting growth of about 10 per cent per annum, this growth in traffic will be travelling through our suburbs, past homes, schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, retirement villages and shopping centres. Growth in container traffic is increasing by 3½ per cent per annum—501,400 TEUs and growing. The vast majority of container freight has its origin and destination in the metropolitan area. Even the optimistic projection of carrying 30 per cent of this on rail will not alleviate the current and future congestion and its associated dangers on suburban roads.

My electorate, and that of the member for Fremantle, will continue to see an increase in road trauma from a lethal mix of heavy freight and family cars as the WA Labor government ignores the need for a completed integrated transport plan. Indeed, when we held hearings in Perth, I put the question to MacTiernan’s bureaucrat as to what studies had been conducted to indicate that the FEB should be deleted. His response was that it was a state government decision. I repeated the question and he repeated that it was a state government decision. In other words, no planning and no analysis has been conducted and a route has been deleted that has been in the planning for over 40 years.

We have travelled throughout Australia and had hearings in all sorts of ports and towns. Just about everywhere, they indicated how important it is that ring-roads be completed. What do we have in Western Australia? We have the enviable situation where we have most of a ring-road completed and we have land set aside for the completion of the ring-road; and the state Labor government is deleting the final portion of it—the portion that is actually critical to the entire thing because it leads right into the port of Fremantle.

The Labor government in Western Australia need to rethink the way in which they have planned for our future freight task. They need to complete both Roe Highway stage 8 and the Fremantle Eastern Bypass to ensure that we have a freight network that is viable in the 21st century.

Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a delight to be able to speak before you, Mr Deputy Speaker Quick. The independence of the chair is absolutely assured; there is no doubt. The member for Tangney has explained the situation very well so that even I, a Queenslander, can understand and visualise the sorts of problems that obviously he and the member for Canning are far more intimately aware of. I think he has done a great service to the parliament with regard to The great freight task report that we are considering.

I want to congratulate the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services on the clarity they have brought to the issues in my electorate of Moreton. The Acacia Ridge intermodal terminal is mainly contained within my electorate, and I am greatly indebted to the committee for flushing out something that the Queensland government simply will not fess up to—that is, that the Queensland Rail controlled facility located 15 kilometres from the Brisbane CBD has, according to this report, some 380,000 TEUs, which, essentially, are 20-foot or longer containers, passing through it each year. The thing that frustrates me—and people in this place have heard me talk about this so many times over the years, and we are getting progress—is that the Howard government, under Auslink, had to negotiate contractual access to the Brisbane-Sydney rail freight line, owned and operated by Queensland Rail. It is amazing, isn’t it, that we had to negotiate to get access to a railway line 100 or so kilometres from the New South Wales border to the Acacia Ridge rail freight terminal? The QR freight terminal at Acacia Ridge then unpacks the trains and puts the goods on the backs of trucks, which then rat run through my electorate, down McCullough Street in the main these days. McCullough Street is now reporting about an 80 per cent increase in the number of trucks. People in my area are being confronted by trucks, authorised by the Queensland government to rat run down that road to get on to the Gateway motorway to go to the port of Brisbane, where the other great intermodal terminal referred to in this particular report is located.

From 1993 to 1996 the Keating government had a program called One Nation. That program was about building a stronger rail network in certain areas. For the first time ever in history a standard gauge rail line was built from Acacia Ridge rail freight terminal to the Port of Brisbane, running mainly through the member for Griffith’s electorate—and I do not mean any disservice to him by that observation. But if I ever see a train on that line, I will give somebody $100, because they have to negotiate the signalling systems of the Queensland Rail Gold Coast line which runs right through my electorate. In other words, the passengers get the priority, which is exactly what the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services is outlining as a fundamental farce in the way our rail freight and intermodal systems are operating.

To sum up: people in my electorate get B-double trucks and 380,000 20-foot containers a year thundering through suburbs, past people’s letterboxes, instead of going down Beaudesert Road and onto the Logan Motorway—the only toll road in the whole state of Queensland. QR refuses to pay a toll to its own government, so it sends all its trucks thundering through my electorate.

I welcome this report because it brings some clarity to the argument. It also highlights the folly of the federal Labor Party’s policy to build a $300 million priority road for trucks through my electorate. They want to extend the Ipswich Motorway onto the Kessels Road corridor and turn it into a Kessels highway—a six-lane extension of the Ipswich Motorway, giving a green light to interstate trucks, while local residents have to wait for the trucks to pass. That is the plan they have for the corner of Kessels Road and Mains Road. It shows the folly which it is. The report also outlines the plans of the Beaudesert Shire Council to move some of that intermodal work to Bromelton, about 50 kilometres south of Acacia Ridge. But either way, if we make better use of rail and actually bring the trains all the way to, say, the Port of Brisbane, you could have a dry port in Brisbane, where the movement of containers could be undertaken in one spot—the Port of Brisbane. You could have road, rail and sea all co-located in one spot. The basic infrastructure is there, but instead we have a lazy approach, a lack of planning, which simply means local residents in my electorate have to suffer as the trucks go by.

Finally, the scariest part of this report is that it forecasts a seven to 10 per cent increase in the number of trucks that will come out of Acacia Ridge. According to this report, King & Co. may have said that Acacia Ridge’s future is constrained by the fact there are so many residential communities nearby, but the point I make is that residents in my electorate are suffering every day—24 hours a day, seven days a week—because of the lack of planning by the Queensland government with regard to the rail freight task. I commend the report to the House.

Debate (on motion by Mr Somlyay) adjourned.