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

In Tasmania yesterday, public schools went back to school. I want to wish the students and parents well as they deal with the challenging times of living with COVID-19 during the school year. I also share the frustration of many parents on Hobart's eastern shore about what this means for traffic delays, particularly around the Mornington roundabout. This roundabout has been identified as a problem for a very long time. There are accidents on it on a regular basis. Importantly, the congestion is incredible, and it backs up every afternoon and causes huge inconvenience. It was first identified by the current state Liberal government in 2020 as a high-priority problem spot to fix. Then, of course, we had the May election last year, a year early, and there has been nothing from the state Liberal government in terms of a commitment to fix this major congestion point on the eastern shore. It is the intersection of several major highways and it causes massive problems every afternoon. All the government committed to was to do a study.

They were obviously successful at the election, and they have done a study. They got the results in October, and here we are with the school year going back. We're in February and still there has been nothing from the government about what the solutions for the Mornington roundabout are. What is the state Liberal government going to do with this major piece of infrastructure that everybody knows has been a problem for years? It was designed under the former state Labor government many years ago, and we knew at that time that it had a life span of 10 to 15 years in terms of the solutions around it. Since then, of course, Hobart's eastern shore has continued to grow, with many housing developments, and that congestion has continued to grow. We know that this is a very significant problem. It's effecting productivity and economic activity, but, importantly, it's impacting on people's lives every single day. The state Liberal government needs to do better, and the current federal government needs to get involved with what is a major intersection of a major Tasmanian highway, the Tasman Highway, on the way down to the airport. This is a priority corridor for both governments, and we have heard nothing about how the Mornington roundabout is going to be fixed.

My residents on the eastern shore have, frankly, had enough of government promises, of delays on projects, of not enough happening, particularly in southern Tasmania, from the current federal Liberal government. They seem focused on the northern seats, and I get that. They want to win an election and they've got marginal seats. But that does not mean that the people in southern Tasmania who need critical infrastructure should miss out. It means that the state and federal Liberal governments need to invest and show some serious solutions for what is going to be happening to the Mornington roundabout on Hobart's eastern shore.