Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Ageing and Seniors) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Hobart Airport roundabout borders both my electorate and the electorate of Lyons. Both sides of politics have made commitments around upgrading this bottleneck in southern Hobart on the eastern shore. Labor, of course, made the commitment first in the 2016 election, followed a month later by the government and the Liberal Party. This Hobart Airport roundabout is critical. The state government have made some wider lanes on it, but the important point here is that, in June 2017, the then minister, Mr Chesters, told us that construction would commence in 2018 and would be finished by late 2020, because there is a two-year construction phase.

Sadly, work still has not begun on this critical piece of infrastructure—not at all. Indeed, tenders were only called for earlier this year, just before the election in April. No tenderer has been announced and no work has commenced, so motorists in the south of Lyons travelling through my electorate to get to the city for work every single morning are blocked at this major intersection.

The state Liberal government and the federal Liberal government need to do better. They need to honour their commitments to the people of my electorate and the south of Lyons because these communities are stuck in traffic every day because these two governments can't get their act together and can't get this critical piece of infrastructure upgraded as they promised. This was a promise from 2016. Here we are in the second half of 2019 and it's still not even started.