Andrew Gee (Calare, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The closure of the Great Western Highway and the crippling fuel supply emergency mean that the people of the Central West are being systematically strangled by twin crises and treated as second-class citizens. Right now the national food bowl is running on empty, and we are about to see a total collapse of the basics. There's an old saying that you reap what you sow, but what can you say to farmers who can't sow because they have empty diesel tanks? If this government can't guarantee the fuel required to put seeds in the ground, it forfeits its right to talk about the cost of living. Let's be clear. Farmers with empty fuel tanks will equal empty supermarket shelves. It's that simple. It's regional and remote areas that have been hit hardest with this national fuel crisis.

But for our region the pain isn't just from the bowser. It's in the failure of a bridge built by a convict chain gang in 1832 that serves as the main highway in and out of our region. The devastating indefinite closure of the Great Western Highway at Victoria Pass has turned our local communities into a high-stakes traffic experiment. In Lithgow the safety of our schoolchildren is being gambled with every single day that passes. We have thousands of huge heavy haulage vehicles diverted off the highway and funnelled directly through the heart of Lithgow. Parents and teachers are terrified, and rightly so. We are one tired driver or one mechanical failure away from tragedy. One primary school principal from Lithgow wrote to me and said they are witnessing increasingly impatient and unsafe driver behaviour around the school, and their community feels they are being left exposed to unnecessary risk. And what about the kids from the Hartley Valley? Their commute, just to get to a classroom, has tripled. They are spending hours trapped in transit because a bridge built by a convict chain gang in the 1830s is apparently the best option that a 21st century government can muster.

I've stood with Shannon in Erin's Outdoor Quality Power Centre and in the gardens of Margaret and Allan's Maple Springs Nursery. I've spoken with Ken Muldoon from Mully's Transport in Hartley. These aren't just impacted stakeholders. They are families watching their bank accounts bleed out. Whether it's Margaret and Allan seeing business vanish by 90 per cent, Shannon struggling to pay his staff or Ken seeing his fuel costs double while his productivity halves, the message is the same: enough is enough.

The Great Western Highway is not fit for purpose, and we are done with the broken promises and funding heists. Our community's demand of this government today: (1) an immediate fuel guarantee for farmers and transport operators in country communities; (2) an immediate slashing of the fuel excise tax until this crisis is over; and (3) a support package for businesses across the region hit by the closure of the Great Western Highway. We are sick of the empty words and broken promises. We want action, and we want it now.