Ferguson calls for national intermodal approach

Federal Labor would support an AusLink-funded national intermodal network in an attempt to relieve congestion at Australia’s capital city ports, shadow transport minister Martin Ferguson said yesterday (Wednesday, August 1). Mr Ferguson told a Shipping Australia lunch in Sydney that while a Rudd Government would support all of the $22bn AusLink program allocated to 2014, there was also an urgent need to address intermodal development. For the last 20 years, Australia had been in &#8220catch-up mode&#8221 in respect to infrastructure spending, Mr Ferguson said. &#8220A Federal Labor Government will focus national land transport spending on not only road and rail networks but on their integration with air, sea and inland ports, so as to create a national intermodal transport network,&#8221 Mr Ferguson said. &#8220My priority goes to infrastructure blockages, because that’s where we’re losing at the moment &#8211 it’s where we’re bearing the cost of congestion in our key capital cities, such as Sydney and Melbourne.&#8221 Mr Ferguson said the negligence of the Labor state governments could not continue. He cited the delays in the New South Wales Government’s approval for intermodal hubs at Enfield and Moorebank. &#8220[We’ve&#93 got to force our state governments to actually do a bit more and I intend raising some of these issues,&#8221 Mr Ferguson said. &#8220Just because I’m a member of the Labor party, where I see some negligence at a state level, it’s also our responsibility to remind my counterparts at a state level that they’ve got to be more urgent about some of these decisions.&#8221 Mr Ferguson called for the Australian Rail Track Corporation to have a bigger role in rural freight lines to prevent the network’s inadequacies from jeopardising Australia’s $5bn grain trade, while also welcoming private investment in other areas. &#8220I’m totally supportive of above rail competition but it seems to me that where rail has been privatised below rail, it’s simply failed,&#8221 he said. Further upgrades to Sydney’s main arterial roads &#8211 including the widening of the M5 at Campbelltown and the F3-M2 connection at Hornsby &#8211 were crucial to ensuring earlier upgrades were not just moving congestion elsewhere.

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