Grievance Debate

YORKEYS CROSSING

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (15:17): I am here today to talk about Yorkeys Crossing. For those who do not know, Yorkeys Crossing is a currently unsealed dirt road. Many people on this side of the house know what it is, have been there and have travelled on it. I suspect that very few on the other side have. This road circumvents Port Augusta.

Mrs Redmond: Crossroads of the nation.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN: As people would know, Port Augusta is a major crossroads of the nation—thank you, leader—covering all traffic that goes north, south, east, and west across the nation. It is a very important piece of road infrastructure.

The important issue here is that all of the traffic that goes from Perth to Sydney and Adelaide to Darwin currently goes across the bridge and through the middle of Port Augusta. With one lane each way, this bridge is under extreme pressure with regard to traffic. As many people might know, Port Augusta is actually a city divided by the very top of Upper Spencer Gulf. People living on the east and west sides have to travel across that bridge. The west side of Port Augusta is growing all the time, but the emergency services (ambulance, hospital and fire station) are all on the east side.

I urge the government to look very seriously at this. Yesterday, a petition was tabled from 3,084 petitioners. At a quick glance, I would say that in excess of 90 per cent have a Port Augusta address, although I did not count them all. This is a very important issue. It is important from a transport perspective. This dirt road is a national piece of road infrastructure which goes around the top of the gulf and so precludes the need to use the bridge. It has been in use for many decades and, until recently, it was the alternate route for road trains. With mining throughout the north of the state growing, traffic through Port Augusta is going to grow and grow, with the expectation that road freight across Australia will double in the next 15 years. Again, that puts more and more pressure on this piece of road infrastructure.

The council has pressed and encouraged the government for quite a few years now, I am told, to invest money in upgrading and sealing Yorkeys Crossing, but to no avail so far, so I am working very hard to try to encourage the government to find funds for this. What has to happen is that the road has to be sealed and also slightly realigned, because the current alignment of the dirt road exactly where it is would not be appropriate for a heavy vehicle bypass, but it would take only a slight realignment down the south-eastern end of Yorkeys Crossing for it to become appropriate.

Another very important issue is that we do not want to take all the economic advantages of the heavy road transport that come through Port Augusta out of Port Augusta. It would require setting up a truck stop/heavy vehicle service station on the new road. Having spent 10 years working in the oil industry, I know that would not be a difficult thing to do as long as the land is available, but it does pass through a section that has lots of free land.

Another important aspect that also has to be noted is that we do not want it to be a bypass that encourages a lot of traffic in addition to the heavy vehicles to go around the outside of Port Augusta because, again, that would hurt the town and, very importantly, town businesses. Careful consideration has to be given to how this road would be sealed and upgraded, but I am confident that it can be done very well.

It is not a hugely expensive exercise. For such an important piece of infrastructure, it is not a hugely expensive exercise. To just seal the road as it is would have an estimated cost of $30 million to $40 million. It is a significant amount of money, but not when you are looking at National Highway 1 and taking all of the road freight from east to west, north to south, across the nation.

The other opportunity that we have, of course, is to double the size of the bridge to put another two-lane bridge over the top of the existing one or side by side. That would be tremendous, but we are talking potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars there. So, I think the best thing is to do step 1 first and do step 2 when we get to it and when we can afford it. It is terribly important. It would not be difficult to make a strong case to bring federal funding into this piece of infrastructure, so it does not put all the pressure on the state government—National Highway 1, very importantly. It would also be quite easy to regulate that only double road trains and triple road trains would have to use this road, thus encouraging other vehicles to stay within Port Augusta and also encouraging local traffic to keep using the road.

The SPEAKER: I draw attention to the state of the house.

A quorum having been formed: