John Cobb (Calare, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the budget handed down in May, there was $300 million reserved to get the inland rail up and running. This was kicked off quite some years ago under former deputy prime ministers and transport ministers John Anderson and Mark Vaile. John Anderson was responsible for making sure the various inquiries and planning were done. They are coming to fruition now for the first time.

It is more than just having $300 million set aside for the planning and the development. I was in Parkes a couple of weeks ago with the mayors of Forbes and Parkes, Ron Penny and Ken Keith, with a planning team which is now headed up by John Anderson. The government appointed John Anderson to head up the planning team. I saw them there in Parkes doing the planning with a man whose title is planning and development officer to actually make this happen.

When talking about the inland rail, we have to be quite bloody-minded in some ways to make sure it happens. Some people think it means they will be getting on and off at every railway station; that will not happen. This has to be a railway that pays for itself and is commercial. Its job is not to get trucks off roads; its job is to stop a lot of the trucks that will go on the roads in the next 20 years if we do not have more rail. We are never going to get trucks off the roads. Our object in making the inland rail and other railways around Australia what they need to be is to stop, as much as possible, more trucks going on the road. When this project was first put up some 12 or 13 years ago—it might be 14 years ago now—it was said that by 2020, the amount of freight that had to go to port would double, which would almost triple the number of trucks. That is the issue.

We have to go for it. We have to make sure that people understand that a service like this will stop where the freight can hook on straightaway. It cannot stop at every small station; its object is to reduce the time between Brisbane and Melbourne by a lot. This means that the town of Parkes, which has developed over the last 20 years into a freight hub, not just for the central west but also eastern Australia, will be even more of a hub in the future. It will be the hub for Darwin, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. The major centres of Australia can be loaded from there. It is a part of the future and it is fantastic to see that future begin.