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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-06-04 Daily Xml
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SOUTH ROAD UPGRADES

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Leader of the Opposition) (14:27): My question is to the Premier. Why should the public trust the government to upgrade South Road from Torrens Road to the River Torrens when they have promised this project before, only to cancel it?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (14:27): I think we have canvassed all of these matters on previous occasions. I will go through it all again if you weren't paying attention, but what happened was, when the new federal Labor government was elected in 2007, they chose to undertake a thoroughgoing analysis of the whole of South Road. It was dedicated as a national freight route. They decided that they wanted to partner with the South Australian government. So, rather than just bearing the burden of actually dealing with South Road by ourselves, for the first time, we had a commonwealth partner with a lot of extra fiscal strength to be able to assist us to undertake the works.

It was intelligent and natural to actually agree to the process they proposed, which was to undertake investigations. They gave us a very substantial amount of money to undertake those investigations. The first thing that became very clear was that an easy job to undertake—because it was an industrial area and had a very strong cost-benefit analysis, I think at 1.8—was the South Road Superway. And so we got busy with that quickly, while the other investigations were undertaken of other elements of South Road. What became obvious then, after the work was completed for the Torrens to Torrens section, with a cost-benefit analysis of 2.4 I think, was that this was an incredibly beneficial project and one which recommended itself.

This was obviously a very important and congested part of South Road. We had a different model for achieving this, so investigations were undertaken which came up with a different way of actually achieving that section of South Road—a much less expensive way of doing it. It had a very strong cost-benefit analysis. We then had a commonwealth partner that was up for 50 per cent of this proposition, and so we obviously made the decision to go with that process. It was an intelligent way of doing it, and it has thrown up a very good result.

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