Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the absurd addiction of our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, to roads, which is about to wreck what is good about inner-city Melbourne. The Prime Minister and the Premier of Victoria, Denis Napthine, are planning to push the east-west tollway right through the inner city. It will do nothing to fix congestion and everything to wreck what is good about inner Melbourne.

On 2 October, the Prime Minister briefly landed in Melbourne and managed to fit in a joint press conference with the Premier to spruik their pet project. During this press conference the Prime Minister revealed that he has absolutely no understanding of Melbourne, its congestion problems, its traffic needs or the impact of this monstrous project on our city and on our community. The Prime Minister said:

… anyone currently sitting in a traffic jam on Hoddle Street, on Flemington Road, on Alexandra Parade knows that this—

the east-west tollway—

is a massive boost to their lives …

Just before last year's federal election, on 2 September, he said

I've spent enough time on Hoddle Street, I've spent enough time on Alexandra Parade and I've spent enough time on Flemington Road stuck in traffic jams to know how important this is. I want it to be done.

The Prime Minister may not have a great grasp of Melbourne's geography and its traffic network, but if you were on this wonderful new east-west tollway and wanted to get into the city there would be only two exits that you could get off at to come into the city. Do you know where those exits are? One is at Hoddle Street and the other is at Flemington Road. The Prime Minister is talking about the traffic jams on Hoddle Street and Flemington Road. They are the only two places where the thousands of cars that will be on the new east-west tollway can exit to get into the city. The east-west tollway is not going to provide you with a magical helicopter lift to get you in over the parks into the middle of the city. The people coming in from the east or from the worst who want to get into the city to go to work are still going to have to use roads to get there, and when they get on those roads they are going to add to the congestion. Everyone in Melbourne knows—which is perhaps why Denis Napthine did not chime in to back up the Prime Minister on this point—that if you want to get roads clearer and you want to get cars off the freeway in the morning the best thing to do is build a train line.

Before the last election the Prime Minister, when he was opposition leader, invited the then Prime Minister to come down and stand at Hoddle Street and look down the Eastern Freeway in the morning. He said anyone who did that would have to see that there is a problem. Yes, there is a problem. But I will tell you what you see. If you stand on the Hoddle Street overpass and looked down the Eastern Freeway in the morning, you see cars bumper to bumper because people are coming in and trying to get to work. As good as the west is , people coming in on the Eastern Freeway in the morning are not wanting to go out to Flemington, Footscray or Kensington; they want to get into the city and they are stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. If you look you can see the bus lane is a bit freer and has a bit more space for buses to come down. But when you look in the middle what you see is a whacking great swathe of grass running almost the whole length of the Eastern Freeway.

Do you know why that is there? That is there for the rail line out to Doncaster. That rail line has been promised to us for decades. In fact, if you go back and look in the Melway for 1979-80, you can see the rail line marked out there, and they have marked out stops as well. That is how long this has been promised to us. If you want to get 800 of those cars off the road, one train coming down the Eastern Freeway from Doncaster will do that. If you have a proper service running, you will start to clear the Eastern Freeway. If you have the Melbourne Metro coming in from the other side, you will start to clear the congestion that you find on Flemington Road.

If the Prime Minister had any understanding of Melbourne traffic at all, he would know that his project is about to pour more cars onto Flemington Road and Hoddle Street—as if you could fit more cars on Hoddle Street. There is only one rule of traffic in Melbourne, and that is, 'Whatever time of day it is and wherever you're going, don't go on Punt Road or Hoddle Street.' But the Prime Minister is planning to put thousands more cars onto Punt Road and Hoddle Street.

Everyone knows the simple thing to do would be to make Melbourne a world-class public transport city. If you have been lucky enough to travel around the world, you know that in a good city you can get around without having to use a car. Melbourne could be one of those cities. It is not that difficult. All we would need to do is build that rail line coming in on the Eastern Freeway from Doncaster. You could have it skirting underneath Fitzroy and Collingwood and have a couple of stops there. You could build the Melbourne Metro coming in from the west so that you could have a train stop underneath North Melbourne and Parkville, where we have the university and world-leading medical research institutes but no train stops. It would not only take thousands of cars off the road; it would make everyone in Melbourne breathe easier.

People in Melbourne need to breathe easier. Perhaps the Prime Minister does not know or, as I suspect, does not care, but when this new east-west tollway is built it is going to be between 20 and 40 metres from people who live in the Housing Commission flats in Flemington. These are people who are already about 100 metres away from the CityLink overpass. Most people fly on over it and see those towers there on their right or left and do not give them a second thought. But people live there. Currently between the CityLink overpass and these towers is a playground. There is a community garden and a community centre. All of that is going to go. The people who live there are going to be opening their windows to be almost within touching distance of the new east-west tollway.

Because I have been inside these towers but, more importantly, have spoken to many people who live there, I can tell you that if they have a couple of days over 40 degrees those concrete boxes do not lose the heat. They retain the heat. There are families in there with kids. They have no option but to open the window at night because it will be about 30 degrees inside one of those flats. When they open their window at night, if they happen to be living on the fourth or fifth floor, they will be about be 20 or 30 metres away from the east-west tollway. If they live on the ground floor—in a surprise that no-one saw coming because the Premier did not have the dignity to put this out to people before he signed off on the project—they are now going to open their window to find themselves next to a four-lane surface road that is about to take over the park and community centre they currently have. All of that is in the name of getting more cars on our roads in inner city Melbourne. All of that is in the name of dividing what is good, separating parts of communities from others and forcing people to live within touching distance of a new road.

For this, people are going to lose their houses. Collingwood resident Keith Fitzgerald's house is one of those that is going to be forcibly acquired. He is 70 and he has lived in the house since 1944. He is devastated that he is about to lose his home of 70 years—a lifetime—and it will be destroyed. And where did this come from? This whole east-west tollway was hatched when the state Labor government was in power. After 11 years in power in Victoria, the best that the state Labor government could come up with for solving Melbourne's transport problems was to suggest the east-west tollway in the first place.

I remember how we had to go and fight to make sure that JJ Holland Park, in Kensington, was not going to be a staging ground for five or 10 years while they built this monstrosity. We fought Labor off then. Now it has come back under the Liberals. But the good news is that there is a chance of stopping it yet again. Victorians will be voting soon, and they have a chance in the state election to put the Greens into the balance of power. We will insist that the contracts be ripped up and that the rail line out to Doncaster be built instead.

We know in Melbourne that you cannot trust the old parties. They talk big on public transport when it comes to an election year and then fail to deliver. I am sick of hearing people talk about the airport rail link once every four years at election time, and then it disappears and never comes back again. Well, people are wising up. There is a reason that the Greens are doing well in the polls in Victoria at the moment. It is that people want to fix Melbourne's congestion by building better public transport. By voting Greens they can get that.