Page 2225 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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The fact is the Labor Party’s position is this: this is not an either/or proposition. This is not about saying you either build the Majura parkway or you invest in better public transport. Both of those things need to occur, and that is the government’s position.
Why do both of these things have to occur? They both have to occur because one is a recurrent cost that fundamentally is about improving frequency and improving the delivery of public transit services to the community. It is not about infrastructure costs. The overwhelming and ongoing demand that our budget will face if we are to improve public transport services in our city is a recurrent cost. It is about paying for more routes. It is about paying for more drivers. It is about paying for greater frequency of services. It is not about an infrastructure investment. It is about a service delivery cost to the community.
The concern I have in this debate is that the Greens are always fixated on a technological solution. And the technological solution will not deliver, on its own, what we need when it comes to public transport. What we need to deliver is greater frequency, greater reliability, greater network opportunities. These are the things that will make public transit work in this city, not the assertion that we choose a particular technology. And unfortunately that is the approach we get from the Greens.
We have also heard the criticism from the Greens that the government’s assertions about the viability and appropriateness of this project are based on some false assumptions. They are wrong. They are wrong to assert that. This project has been assessed multiple times in terms of its economic benefit, in terms of its contribution to the national freight task. It has been assessed in detail not just by the ACT government but by Infrastructure Australia, who has ranked it as one of its top priority projects.
The federal government is not going to say that in principle this project warrants federal funding unless it meets the very strict criteria that are imposed in relation to the assessment of national infrastructure projects. The same criteria they have used to tick off projects such as the Gold Coast light rail project are being applied to this project.
If the federal government is getting it right when it comes to infrastructure funding for the light rail project on the Gold Coast, using these criteria, the same criteria that they have used to say this project also stacks up in terms of its economic benefit and its social benefit, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot argue that some decisions using those criteria are right and other decisions using those criteria are wrong.
The fact is this project stacks up. It stacks up. And why does it stack up? It stacks up because overwhelmingly it is about connecting freight links. It is about upgrading a key link between major highways that service south-eastern Australia, the Federal Highway through to the Monaro Highway. It is about the increasingly important role that the Canberra airport will play in terms of delivery of freight to the city and the region and the fact that industrial uses on the eastern side of the city continue to grow. We heard no mention from the Greens of issues such as the fact that there is significant growth in our own industrial estates.
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