Page 1710 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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project for our city, one that will do much for local industry and business, one that will do much to improve transport in our city—better transport for all Canberrans.
The budget provides $20.4 million to contribute to progressing the project to an investment-ready stage. This will allow the Capital Metro Agency to deliver critical elements of its project plan, including a reference design, an analysis of procurement methodology options, contract development, and the identification of appropriate enabling and associated works.
All of these works are needed to get us to the point to make the critical decision on how to progress this important election commitment. Capital metro is a project, a light rail project, that has a positive cost-benefit analysis, a cost-benefit analysis that stacks up well against other light rail projects around the world and around Australia. It is a project that will deliver better transport for our city, not just for those who use the project but also for those who travel along that corridor. It has network-wide benefits for the road network as a whole.
Reducing congestion on Northbourne Avenue by enabling more people to use public transport along the corridor means that other parts of the road network operate more efficiently and with less congestion. Think about roads such as Barry Drive. Think about roads such as Ginninderra Drive. Think about the Federal Highway itself, and traffic coming in from the Barton Highway. All of these parts of the road network, and the road users, benefit from better public transport provision—as well as those who use the service itself.
It is a project with a good, strong, cost-benefit analysis. It is a project with an effective benefit across the transport system as a whole. And we know now that it is also a project that delivers jobs into our local economy. The report released from Ernst & Young in the last few days confirms over 3,500 jobs being delivered into this project over the key period of its construction, and up to 50,000 jobs being enabled and realised along the corridor over the decades following its construction and completion. This is consistent with the experience of light rail projects in other cities. On the Gold Coast, stage 1 of that system generated around 6,000 direct and indirect jobs. Sydney’s CBD and south-east light rail projects are projected to create 10,000 jobs.
These are big infrastructure projects, and they support jobs in our construction sector at a time when the construction sector is facing a very significant downturn. Many of these jobs are low-skill jobs. They are labouring jobs. But they are also skilled tradespeople’s jobs—electricians, bricklayers, carpenters, all of the key skills that we want to support in our economy, particularly with young people working in these sectors as our economy is facing a significant downturn in other areas. This is a very important investment in terms of jobs, and it delivers on those jobs.
The project also delivers on providing business and investment certainty. In the long term, the economic benefits of light rail are associated with increasing the value of land along the corridor, increasing the opportunities for business to choose to locate their operations close to the corridor, because they value the reliability and the certainty that a light rail project delivers.
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