Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

There's already been a lot of talk today about this in this chamber, but I will go back to the Inland Rail cuts and what they mean for my area of the Hunter. Previously, before coming to this place, I was working for the Port of Newcastle, and we were working on the container terminal because it's such an important piece of infrastructure for the Hunter. Anytime a container terminal gets to a million TEU, you see year-on-year economic growth of 1.5 per cent above national growth, just by the innovation. I think it's the agglomeration effect—that's quite a strange name—that sees that happen.

A point of connectivity for the Port of Newcastle was going to be a 1.6-kilometre rail loop directly on the port, which would have connected to the Inland Rail via a 40-tonne-per-axle coal line going up to the Hunter Valley. In this budget, the cut to the $6.5 billion Narrabri-Narromine section means that is dead. That connection will no longer take place. The connection to the Central West and the north-west of this state will no longer happen. We will see a hit to the Port of Newcastle's business case for spending $2 billion to build the container terminal to make Australian shipping more efficient. The whole thing is in doubt because of this cut.

The government can say that it was going to cost $45 billion and that there wasn't a business case, but that Narrabri-Narromine section was so important. They've cut $6.5 billion. The one thing we're lacking is productivity gains, and this would have done that. I was adjacent to the business case because I was there. A TEU of wine would have saved $1,800 by shipping out of Australia via this. That's for one box—doing nothing differently than sending it out of the country via that rail. That money would have stayed in local communities, but that is gone. For cotton, almost $1,000 a box would have been saved for the community and farmer by doing it that way, and that has now gone. Where has the money gone? There's $500 million to walkways and cycleways and $695 million to the high-speed rail that will never be built. If we want productivity gains, we have to do the hard things but do the right things.