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

I rise tonight to speak about the so-called Perth Freight Link—an unwelcome intrusion into the lives of the residents of Perth's southern suburbs. This is a campaign that has had a very, very long fuse. It was lit as long ago as the late 1950s with the Stephenson-Hepburn plan that mandated a ring, a network, of freeways for road and rail passenger and freight transport throughout the Perth metropolitan area. The city, by and large, has grown along the spine of that original plan in the late 1950s. The rail, unfortunately, was largely discarded, and we have been left with one or two ghost freeways, lines on maps, reservations and easements that have been left behind—reflections of an age that has long ago passed us but nonetheless are being progressed by the Abbott government in an act that I would say is—and there are a number of candidates for this label—one of the most extraordinarily irresponsible funding decisions made by a government of any flavour in my experience.

The Perth Freight Link proposes to smash four to six lanes of tarmac through the Beeliar Wetlands, wrecking a recognised Aboriginal site that is sacred to the local Nyoongar people, a camp site that still bears the traces of when people would make their way up from the south-west into the area of the Swan coastal plain, into the area that is now occupied by the city, and that now is an area of internationally recognised wetlands, the Beeliar Regional Park. We understand that the proposed freight link is then to carry on up Stock Road, destroying one of the last stands of intact banksia woodland on the way through, join onto the Leach Highway and then somehow make its way across the Swan River and into the container port in Fremantle. The Abbott government has committed, sight unseen, nearly $1 billion to this concrete obscenity, to a project that might as well have been sketched on a bit of butcher's paper for all the detail that local residents, local planners or local councils for that matter have been given. The state government that has proposed this thing will not release the cost-benefit analysis. Nobody has seen the business case, including Infrastructure Australia—the Commonwealth bureaucrats who are tasked with assessing this. The Prime Minister had already made the announcement that he would be supporting it. The state government does not even know where this freeway will go. They do not have any idea how it is going to make its way into the port of Fremantle.

Premier Colin Barnett, do you remember when you used to go to COAG meetings and you would sit down next to Premier Napthine from Victoria? Do you notice how he is not there anymore? The reason for that is that the Liberals in Victoria got thrown out of office when they threw their political fortunes in with the East West Tunnel. It cost them an election. That is what is about to happen in Western Australia if the Barnett government does not read the signs about what is coming. State transport minister Nalder just appears to be flailing around helplessly in the prosecution of this project. People must just shake their heads. Whether you live in the impact area or not, this is an utter debacle in the making. Mr Nalder could not even tell residents in Palmyra whether or not they would be losing their houses as this freight highway barges through Perth's southern suburbs on its way into the port. Mr Nalder said of residents:

I can understand their anguish but we are still at the early stages of finalising that route into the Port of Fremantle.

The state transport minister and Premier Barnett should be thoroughly condemned for the way in which they have handled this project.

I have never seen a project that is more like a headless monster that the government is determined to push through, no matter how many houses have to be destroyed and no matter how much bushland is pushed under bulldozer blades in the process. They do not even know whether it is going to be a road or a tunnel. Residents of Bibra Lake and North Lake do not know yet whether this is to be an elevated freeway that will fly over the wetlands, making it the most expensive section of freeway ever built in Western Australia, or whether it is planned to smash through at ground level. Residents of North Fremantle do not know, because neither does the government, how the Perth Freight Link is going to connect to the port. All it is doing is creating an extraordinary bottleneck of container traffic on the back of trucks that are going to be charging into the port, somehow bottlenecked in from this so-called freight link.

The city of Fremantle, which is doing, I think, a great job on behalf of rate payers to try to pull the state and federal governments back from this madness, has commissioned a report by the Curtin University Sustainable Policy Institute—CUSP. That independent report, commissioned by the city of Fremantle, has described the best option as being that the Perth Freight Link be redirected to Kwinana and that a cap and transition scenario be used for Fremantle harbour to enable building the outer harbour, as originally planned in Perth's planning scheme. The second best option is to upgrade the rail system using electrification and double stacking, which will require a dedicated rail bridge, and that is something that the Greens had costed at the last election. The third best, although very expensive, is a rail tunnel from the inner harbour, under the Swan River, emerging in Spearwood, on the current freight rail alignment. The fourth best option is to have a road tunnel from High and Leach to dive under White Gum Valley and Clontarf Hill to emerge onto the Roe 9 right of way, although extraordinary issues would then still remain on the North Fremantle bottleneck, and we would still be sacrificing out corridor through the Beeliar Wetlands.

The study identified that what the state and federal governments are blindly pursuing is the worst possible option for dealing with freight traffic in and out of Fremantle harbour, and so what we are calling on tonight is for the state and federal governments to cease this headlong rush. The Commonwealth government, which says that it is so desperately financially strapped, should not commit a dollar to this project until the state government can sort out what on earth it is doing. With this evidence now on the table, we believe there is a path forward for managing freight traffic that does not involve the kind of disastrous impact on neighbourhood amenity, on urban bushland, on the wetlands of the Beeliar wetland chain and on the Aboriginal heritage that happens to be under the path of this freeway.

To the tenderers involved in this project, this is something you really do not want to be involved in. Our office did a little bit of backtracking and a bit of research of the three tenderers. Can you imagine that this thing has gone out. This project is worth $1.6 billion. The government does not yet know where it is going, how much it is eventually going to cost, or how much it is going to do, yet they are in the process of letting tenders for its construction. The first tendering consortium, led by BGC Contracting, as far back as the records that we could identify, identified $23,000 in donations to the state and federal Liberal parties. So congratulations to you BGC Contracting. The second batch of tenderers, led by Clough—$90,000. A wonderful contribution to the fortunes of the federal and WA Liberal and National parties. The third tenderer, led by Leighton—$1,506,850. All three tendering consortia for this project have been generously donating to the Liberal Party.

We say to you tonight, if you are listening in from outside this building and you happen to be involved in one of the companies tendering to dump enormous volumes of concrete through people's neighbourhoods, this is one contract you do not want to win. It is one contract that you do not want to win, because the fight you will be picking is not just with the Greens, and it is not with the Labor party—it is with people who have been trying to stop this project for decades, whether it be the Bibra Lake and North Lake residents associations, the Cockburn Community Wildlife Corridor Association, the Coolbellup Community Association, groups like the Wetlands Conservation Society, the Fremantle Road to Rail group, Willagee Alive or Save Beeliar Wetlands. These groups have led this campaign for years. Also, there are the Fremantle Environmental Resource Network, FERN, which would have to be demolished if this thing ploughs through on Leach Highway, the North Fremantle Community Association, the Wildflower Society, the Conservation Council, the Maritime Union of Australia, and the Urban Bushland Council. The number of these groups is growing every week. So tonight I am saying that, if you are outside this building and you are listening in and you want to do something to stop this project, my message is: we are going to stop the Perth Freight Link. It will not destroy the Beeliar wetland chain. It will not disfigure neighbourhoods from Northlake all the way through to North Fremantle.

The $1.6 billion worth of taxpayers money could be better deployed in getting freight onto rail and in getting passengers onto rail as well. Tonight, I am asking: will you join us? That means targeting those contractors if they are so unwise as to put in bids to flatten these neighbourhood areas and these urban bushland areas, and to take the fight up to the Barnett government and to the Abbott government. Not a dollar worth of taxpayers money should be spent on this project. There are far better alternatives than what the government has in mind. We will see this campaign through. The Perth Freight Link Project will not be going ahead in its current form. We urge the government to listen to the evidence and to listen to the community.