John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The expansion and electrification of railways is one of the more effective means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and reducing road congestion and the unending road toll. With these advantages in mind, our government has committed $840 million toward the Northern Sydney Freight Corridor project that runs from Strathfield in my electorate to Newcastle. It is a forward-looking plan that will, amongst other benefits, result in more than 200,000 heavy vehicles being taken off the road each year, a reduction in the consumption of expensive, imported diesel fuel by 40 million litres per year and a reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions of 100,000 tons.

In my electorate this project will see a new rail underpass for freight trains at North Strathfield, a new track connected to the existing relief goods loop line at North Strathfield and 2.4 kilometres of new track, and the upgrade of 850 metres of existing track. Under the previous Howard government Australian railways entered a very dark age that, with the exception of the Alice Springs to Darwin railway, saw tracks torn up, services abandoned, freight wagons cut up and, in New South Wales, 60 serviceable electric locomotives scrapped.

Responsible governments around the world are implementing measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—in particular, expanding railway electrification. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, transport produces one-sixth of Australia's carbon dioxide emissions and, due in part to the Howard government's policies of expanding road freight at the expense of railways, emissions from the transport industry were 29 per cent higher in 2008 than in 1990.

As we know, the Leader of the Opposition said in his inaugural speech in this place, 'The government's job is not to lay rails, shift earth and pour concrete,' so no-one should be under any illusion that an Abbott government would ever have undertaken an important initiative like the Northern Sydney Freight Corridor project. Following the oil shocks of the 1970s, engineers in the United States and other countries investigated railway electrification as a means of reducing dependence on oil. They found advantages that include lower running costs and lower maintenance costs of locomotives and multiple units, a higher power-to-weight ratio resulting in fewer locomotives required, faster acceleration, higher practical limit of power and a higher speed limit. Other benefits include quieter operation, independence from interruptions to oil supplies and lower carbon dioxide pollution.

Despite these evident benefits the Howard government, in its amalgamation of Australian National Railways and the New South Wales railways' FreightCorp collaborated in scrapping or mothballing 10 type 85 class and 50 type 86 class electric locomotives worth hundreds of millions of dollars that had previously served the New South Wales railways well. Among the consequences of this extraordinary act of vandalism was that freight operators on New South Wales railways, always short of motive power, were forced to import 16 secondhand diesel locomotives from Denmark.

Numbers of worn out and decrepit diesel locomotives, well past their intended useful life, have been returned to service and can regularly be seen hooked together as multiple units struggling to haul strings of freight cars that were formerly pulled by a single, powerful electric locomotive. The diesel locomotives that now haul freight trains through my electorate produce serious noise and exhaust pollution that directly affects many people who live near railway lines where freight trains operate. Worse, as an increasing number of freight trains use the Northern Sydney Freight Corridor, the impact of these locomotives will only intensify unless electric locomotives are re-commissioned to replace the decrepit diesels that now pump out toxic emissions and noise into the environment.

In concluding, in spite of the best efforts of the Howard government, a significant number of electric locomotives do survive hidden away in various depots and sidings. I have no doubt that many of these clean, quiet and powerful machines could be returned to service to the benefit of those constituents who live alongside rail corridors in my electorate. I will have more to say on this in the near future, because the enemy, time, has beaten me tonight. (Time expired)