Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the documents.

I thank the chamber for the opportunity to speak to these documents that were tabled by Senator Payne a short time ago and I thank Senator Payne for putting them into the public domain. Similar to the issues that Senator Carr has just raised at length on the East West Link in Melbourne, the documents that I sought the Commonwealth to release relate to the Perth Freight Link—a project that has no social licence in Perth's southern suburbs. It is, in fact, hated. Let us put this very clearly on the record: nobody wants it. It is a proposal that will do absolutely nothing towards its stated objective of taking container traffic off Leach Highway and other approach roads to the container port in North Fremantle. In fact, quite the reverse—it is likely, from our analysis, that the project will create a hideous traffic bottleneck in North Fremantle.

This so-called freight superhighway between Kenwick, Perth airport and the southern suburbs out to Fremantle port is precisely the opposite direction in which we need to be travelling. We should be getting container freight off the roads and onto rail. There has not been one dollar of investment by this government. This government has pulled funding for freight and passenger rail out of the Commonwealth budget and, instead, put it into obsolete road infrastructure, such as what we are discussing today. This is a project that has no social licence. It is a freeway to nowhere.

To the credit of the former state Labor government, the Fremantle Eastern Bypass was taken off the planning books. There is now housing being built through that corridor. It is dead. It was meant to be the feeder road that would take the traffic from the Roe Highway extension. This is a freeway extension that is effectively a road to nowhere—smashing through five kilometres of Banksia woodland and seasonal wetlands, destroying Aboriginal heritage sites and ruining neighbourhood amenity. And for what?

The state government's own scoping documents the last time it was assessed established that it would have absolutely negligible impact on container traffic on Leach Highway. So those in the city of Melville who are trying to do the right thing by their constituents in diverting traffic to make somebody else's life a misery are, in effect, backing a project that simply multiplies the problem and takes it somewhere else. Why the hell aren't we getting this container traffic off freeways and onto rail? A simple duplication of the Fremantle rail bridge to give dedicated access to freight traffic out of the port of Fremantle would de-bottleneck that access to the port and make an enormous difference as soon as it is separated from the passenger rail network. That is the kind of network thinking that we need to be engaged in rather than this insane drive towards more urban freeways.

This is a project that was nowhere near Infrastructure Australia's priority list. It has been brought forward and this Commonwealth government has dedicated $925 million to a project that has not completed Commonwealth environmental impact assessment and that has no business case. The cost-benefit analysis has numbers that were quite obviously cooked. We have just been told that they cannot be put into the public domain. In effect, the Senate and the people of Western Australia and Perth's southern suburbs are being told to get stuffed by a government that has committed $900 million of taxpayers' money to ramming this freeway through their neighbourhood and through this priceless Banksia woodland area.

Well, it is not going to happen. It is absolutely not going to happen. Local residents, communities and people across Perth's suburbs have been fighting this proposal for 20 years, and we will continue to do so. But it should not have to be this way. Why are we continually having to confront repetitive acts of utter stupidity? This urban bushland is too precious to lose. I want to acknowledge the people from the Save Beeliar Wetlands alliance, other groups, those who are trying to defend the top end of High Street and the approach to Fremantle, including those councillors and the mayor of the City of Fremantle, who have told the state government to go back to the drawing board and put some proper plans together, and also those right along this so-called freight corridor who are doing everything they can to bring some sanity back into the debate.

Apparently, there is a secret cost-benefit analysis out there that says there is a five-to-one benefit-to-cost ratio. So for every dollar of the $925 million that Prime Minister Tony Abbott proposes to spend on this obsolete piece of infrastructure, there will be $5 somehow magically generated. Here is what I think is likely to be the case: when this document finally drops into the public domain, when somebody inside the state public service finally slips it under the door of a journalist or an MP—and I am not dropping any hints there—so that this material ends up in the public domain where it belongs, we will find a whole pile of made-up numbers. On the cost side we will find that they have substantially undercooked the cost of this project and on the benefit side we will find that they just take the $925 million, which is just the Commonwealth cost component, and the other 20 per cent to be carried by the state and magically invent $4 to $5 billion worth of benefits, as people are want to do when they start project ideas as a foregone conclusion. This has not been properly assessed. It will be defeated. It is not a project the Perth's suburbs need.

I am very proud to stand with those campaigners and local residents' action groups, the Aboriginal people who have custodianship over sites in the path of this mad project and those who are standing up for the urban bushland in Perth's suburbs. It is absolutely irreplaceable. We are facing local extinctions of keystone species like the Carnaby's cockatoo and other iconic species on the Swan Coastal Plain, which is being torn to shreds by urban development. You would have thought, in the teeth of peak oil and with Perth's traffic already paralysing the city—peak hour now goes for three hours at either end of the day—that a state government, utterly moribund, with no business at all before the state parliament and with absolutely no ideas in its second term, which it apparently won without any idea why it was even bothering, would not proceed with this project, which should have been dead, buried and taken out of the Metropolitan Region Scheme decades ago.

The Greens will be standing up with our colleagues in the Labor Party, who have also, to their great credit, opposed this project from the beginning, with our colleagues on the crossbenches and with those right through the community of all political persuasions, in Bibra Lake, in North Lake and across the alignment for this route all the way into Fremantle and North Fremantle. We will continue to stand with them until this ridiculous project—this absolute abuse of taxpayer funding and abuse of Infrastructure Australia's process of independent assessment—is taken off the books once and for all.

Question agreed to.