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

As we well know, Australia's transport system, with the exception of the suburban and interurban electric railway systems, depends increasingly on imported oil drawn from suppliers in South-East Asia and the Middle East.

According to the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics, in fiscal year 2009-10, every day Australia imported about 70 megalitres of oil, which is half of the total daily consumption. Oil production in Australia peaked in 2000 at 131 megalitres per day and has been steadily declining since then. The difference between consumption and local production is increasingly made up by imports from an international market characterised by rising prices and insecurity of supply.

Australian oil production peaked and then began an unavoidable decline under the Howard government. However, instead of taking feasible measures to reduce demand for oil, that government, asleep at the wheel on so many matters of national importance, presided without concern over a growth in consumption of 15 per cent. These days, the national bill for fuel imports tops $118 million per day and is, as all motorists well know, constantly increasing.

One of the most effective means of reducing dependency on imported oil is to increase the use of energy-efficient railways, for both long-distance and local transport. Yet, under the Howard government, railway lines were torn up, locomotives and rolling stock were cut up for scrap and the volume of goods transported by road increased by almost 20 per cent. After years of scandalous neglect of vital rail infrastructure, rail freight, as a proportion of total freight, is amongst the lowest in the developed world. As the following dismal figures from 2008 show: Sydney-Melbourne, general plus intermodal, 18 per cent of total freight; Sydney-Brisbane, general plus intermodal, 14 per cent of total freight; Australian manufactured goods classified by materials, 2.1 per cent of total freight; and Australian containers, 15.9 per cent of total freight.

The hostility of the Liberal-National Party governments to public transport has a long history and reached peaks of destruction during the Kennett government in Victoria in the 1990s and, before that, during the notorious Askin government. Following the large-scale closure of branch lines in New South Wales in the 1960s by Premier Askin, the expected savings failed to materialise because the loss of revenue from the closed branch lines, which had provided traffic for the main lines, was compounded by the continuing costs of running the resulting less-profitable mainline services. Moreover, the increased costs of greater road maintenance and other services imposed by the trucks that replaced the trains were never taken into account.

This failed outcome shows that the railways could have kept a substantial proportion of freight traffic if the conservative governments of the day had any understanding of the consequences of their ill-conceived policies. If abandoned freight services were to be re-established, rail freight could displace a considerable volume of road freight, with a proportionate reduction in consumption of imported fuel and emissions of carbon dioxide, not to mention a significant decrease in road traffic fatalities. In the United States about 40 per cent of freight is carried by railways, mainly because that country was spared the destructive closure of apparently unprofitable branch lines by economically illiterate government reformers like those who wrecked the railways in Britain and Australia in the 1960s and seventies.

More recently, the counterproductive policies of the Howard government saw over 100 relatively modern New South Wales electric locomotives, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, scrapped and cut up. That flawed decision was part of the deal that saw the New South Wales rail freight operator FreightCorp amalgamated with the Commonwealth's National Rail. Although some of the 85- and 86-class locomotives that were cut up needed major repairs, incompetence and mismanagement by the Howard government saw about one-fifth of New South Wales railway locomotives destroyed at a time when locomotives were in short supply.

Underlining this monumental policy failure, investigations in the United States following the oil shock of the 1970s showed conclusively that the cost of electrification of major routes paid for itself within six years, with reduced maintenance costs, reduced energy costs, improved capacity and higher service speeds.

Following a long interval of chronic underinvestment, the Labor government is reversing the neglect of the last lost decade and is taking important steps to rebuild the nation's vital railway infrastructure—a most necessary response to the challenges of global warming and an uncertain outlook for world fuel supplies.