Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is mind-boggling that after 2½ years in opposition, the best the WA Liberal Party can come up with in terms of their vision for Western Australia is Roe Highway stage 8 and stage 9—a dead and discredited private toll road, a tunnel with no feasibility study that would be the longest in Australia and through which dangerous freight is not allowed, and a project that would drain billions of dollars from a budget that is only now recovering from the debt mountain left to us by the Barnett government. It is hard to believe that Roe 8 could really be the best idea they've managed after 2½ years of deep reflection. Their brilliant new vision is a 50-year-old road to nowhere—the same road that was the centrepiece of their 2017 election campaign in which they suffered the largest electoral loss in WA's history. If ever there was a mandate for a different and sensible approach, this is it.

The people of WA deserve better than the reheated leftovers of the Barnett government—a government characterised by arrogance, waste, debt and incompetence. Nothing encapsulated those failures better than Roe Highway stage 8. Since March 2017, the McGowan Labor government has begun delivering a 21st century transport network, which includes investment of more than $1 billion in five major road, rail and bridge projects in the Fremantle electorate. How is it that after 2½ years the WA Liberals have got nothing to show but an unhealthy obsession with the corpse of a 50-year-old road plan?