2016-02-03
Senator LUDLAM: I move:
That the Senate take note of the minister's response.
I acknowledge the minister's response, sketchy though it might have been. I recognise that Senator Colbeck is in a representative capacity. I think it is a shame that the department did not see fit to provide him with the brief.
The questions that I have put on notice relate to the documentation provided to the federal government-or not, as the case may be-by the Western Australian government on the Perth Freight Link. I think it is appropriate that this issue is raised in the first sitting week of parliament for 2016 because this is going to be a very big issue. It could be put to bed very rapidly, either at a state level or at a Commonwealth level, or it could explode into a federal and then state election issue in Western Australia.
The fact of the matter is that I have never seen greater incompetence in an infrastructure funding decision at a state level than that which has attended the proposed Perth Freight Link in Western Australia. In case senators from outside Western Australia are not aware of what I am talking about, there is a proposal for four or, by some accounts, six lanes of tarmac through the Beeliar Regional Park and the Beeliar Wetlands that would flatten an area of wetlands that is a very important cultural place for the Aboriginal people of the region and has been for tens of thousands of years. It then proposes to smash through just under 100 hectares of urban bushland-almost pristine and intact banksia woodland.
This is a freeway project that was put in the planning scheme in Western Australia in 1955. Those lines that were marked on a map in the mid-1950s in the Stephenson-Hepburn plan are still being used as an excuse in the early 21st century for why we should be hammering this urban bushland and wetland. It is a proposal that has put neighbourhood amenities at risk in Bibra Lake, North Lake and Palmyra. It is a road to nowhere. I have never seen greater incompetence in a proposal for a publicly funded infrastructure project than what has been pursued by Premier Barnett and transport minister Dean Nalder, who, quite frankly, should have been sacked months ago over this debacle and the stress that it has put people through.
The EPA approval was knocked over late last year in the Western Australian Supreme Court. That was a rare judgement, but it was a strident judgement in condemnation of the EPA's conduct over this issue. The Commonwealth, as I said, has a remedy very easily at hand. The Commonwealth can tell Premier Barnett-it could do it this afternoon with a phone call by Senator Mathias Cormann-that there will not be a dollar of Commonwealth taxpayers' money going to this project. It has been hammered in the state Supreme Court. It is under attack in the Federal Court. It is politically massively unpopular. There is an extraordinarily powerful mobilisation of community groups, environmental campaigners, Aboriginal elders and families. This project will not be going ahead. If the federal government wants to save itself and the hapless Premier Barnett a world of misery through this forthcoming election campaign, it simply needs to turn off the funding tap.
I will turn very briefly to the three pages of questions. I am not going to go through them in any kind of detail. I hope that Senator Colbeck is able to update the chamber either later today or tomorrow. Three different numbers emerged from the cost-benefit analysis that was submitted by the Western Australian government in a rather feeble attempt to justify the project. Nobody outside the bureaucrats who crafted it or the consultants that they had put it together has ever seen the workings or the assumptions that resulted in these imaginary numbers. So we are seeking some information to be put into the public domain as to how the Barnett government came up with some of these imaginary numbers.