The Australian Trucking Industry Association (ATIA) used its favourite rhetorical trick to sing the praises of a compliant Rudd government. “This is inline with our submission to the 2008/09 budget that the Government should spend more on road maintenance, which would generate an immediate boost to the economy. It would also deliver lasting benefits for everyone who uses the roads, because … Australia’s existing roads are just plain worn out.”
At the time, the ATA was pushing the case for road maintenance as opposed to building new roads but the key rhetoric is in place. Everyone and the beast that must be fed, the economy, benefit from spending on roads. The cost of building roads is therefore a community cost rather than a running cost of transport companies that use them. The ATA submission to the productivity Commission Inquiry into Rail and Road Freight in April 2006 stated, “full cost pricing [of freight transport] could result in a 12% freight increase and a $9bn loss in demand.”
So, by the trucking industry’s own figures, road transport is being subsidised by the tax payers to the tune of billions of dollars each year and would not be competitive without those subsidies.
Why spend billions on roads, when everyone, including the oil companies, calculate that the oil will run out in less than forty years? Why spend billions on interstate highways for freight transport when everyone, including the trucking companies, recognise that it is only through government subsidies that road transport can compete with rail?
The reason, of course, is that trucking companies are big contributors to the government coffers and that a handful of major transport groups own both the road and the rail networks. They are simply directing governments to spend the money where it earns them the biggest profit.
What we need here in the Tweed, is a sensible approach to improving the existing road structure that increases the capacity for rail transport in the future. This accepts that a tottering NSW government cannot bite the bullet and build a rail way instead of a new road. Nevertheless, it is madness for them not to allow for a rail link beside the motorway as they move mountains in their short-sighted worship of the internal combustion engine. Queensland did it at Tugun. We must do it here.
Put the pressure on Geoff Provost and Justine Elliot now to insist that the Auslink funding that comes jointly from the Federal and State government for the Sexton Hill bypass is tied to a provision for a rail tunnel. Otherwise those frogs will get the jump on us.
Hear Giovanni Ebono on Bay FM 99.9FM today between 9:00am and 11:00am