Port Management Further Amendment Bill 2012 – Second Reading Speech delivered in Parliament 14 August 2012
Mr PALLAS (Tarneit) — It gives me pleasure to rise to speak in relation to the Port Management Further Amendment Bill 2012. In so doing I want to express my concern about the delay in the progression of debate on this bill. You would have thought that a bill that saw its principal objectives and initiatives, as contained in the explanatory memorandum, as improving requirements for safety and environmental management
Page 3026
plans for ports, improving planning coordination at the port of Geelong and making minor improvements relating to hazardous port activities regulated at the port of Melbourne might have found its way from the second-reading speech to the business paper of this place somewhat faster than the three and half months that fell between the second-reading speech and today. In many ways it really does demonstrate the fact that this government is more intent on the shopfront than it is on substantive policy engagements.
I particularly want to concentrate on the claim by the Minister for Ports that this bill is consistent with the government’s long-term plans and vision for the development of commercial ports in Victoria. There will be, I assume, some prize for anybody who is ultimately able to identify this government’s plans for long-term port development.
It is quite apparent to anybody who is observing this government that what we have is a shambolic approach based on a potpourri of ideas, poorly constructed within any policy framework and incapable of being adequately elucidated by the minister responsible for this portfolio.
The net consequence of the minister’s failure to substantively explain the government’s clear long-term vision for the development of the commercial ports in Victoria is that every time he is caught up in a criticism of this government’s failure to act he seeks to derive a touchstone of comfort by saying, ‘Well, look, essentially we are producing a policy that will deliver the development of the port of Hastings. After all, aren’t we developing Webb Dock and increasing the containment capacity of the port of Melbourne?’.
Insofar as the development of Webb Dock and the port of Melbourne are concerned, they are initiatives of the previous government under the port container capacity upgrade process, and indeed the minister has acknowledged on occasion that that is the case. But the big difference between the purported clear vision of this government and what Labor did in government is that Labor recognised that you need to not only provide for the development of port capacity but also assure the community that in developing the port capacity you are making a substantial investment in infrastructure. That will ensure the recognition and acceptance of those developments by the local community.
All we have seen from this government when it comes to so-called upgrades at the port of Melbourne is effectively a proposal that the government will ensure something like $900 million worth of debt both in terms of increasing the capacity of Webb Dock and the car trade.
We are also seeing from this government a continued response that it will put more and more truck traffic onto the Monash Freeway and the West Gate Freeway. Indeed it is acknowledged by the Port of Melbourne Corporation that there will be a doubling of port-related truck traffic over the Monash Freeway and the West Gate Freeway as a consequence of these initiatives. Where are we seeing from this government a recognition that something should be done about that?
There was an integrated plan or strategy from the previous government: it was called Port Futures and Freight Futures, and it was about hard infrastructure that would ultimately not only deliver an effective, performing port but also demonstrate that the government was prepared to do more than simply shift debt onto the Port of Melbourne Corporation and shift containers onto already congested freeways. We did that by investing in infrastructure that would overcome the problems that this government seems totally unconcerned about.
What did we do apart from putting $1.4 billion into the extra lane on the Monash-West Gate Freeway and the development and conclusion of the channel deepening project — a project that those opposite did everything possible to frustrate and delay? Who could forget the words of wisdom of the now leader of the state, the Premier, who said he supported channel deepening but did not support deepening the mouth of the Yarra River? What a preposterous and ludicrous statement. He was effectively saying we should deepen the port of Melbourne but have a depth-constrained container industry, which would effectively destroy the container industry.
Now members of the government say they are the great proponents of a clear vision and direction for Victoria. What is the vision for Victoria when it comes to ports? I have done some research, and I found what the government’s policies are in respect of ports. You need go no further than to the Minister for Ports’s very own website.
If you look at his website, under the heading ‘Policies’ you will see this piece of clarity:
- There is currently no content.
If you are starting to feel a little bit embarrassed by that, the minister would not be. If you go to the noticeboard on the very same web page, you will see the message ‘Write a plate for your state’. This is of course the government’s proposal for a numberplate slogan. It might not have a ports policy, but for the last two years it has been working assiduously on coming up with a numberplate slogan. If it takes the government two years to come up with a numberplate slogan, God help us if we are waiting for it to produce a policy that is
Page 3027
coherent, credible and capable of actually delivering for the concerns of the people of Victoria.
Under the so-called clear strategy that the Baillieu government is intent on implementing, with which this legislation is consistent, the government has replaced the former government’s Port Futures plan with nothing. If you want any further confirmation of the fact that there are no policies, that the government’s new plan is that there are no plans, you simply need to go back to the minister’s website. Port Futures is effectively gone, and this is part of a wider pattern we are seeing from this government of inaction on policy development in transport and infrastructure. The pre-existing transport plans of the last government have been terminated and listed on the Department of Transport’s website as ‘former strategies and plans’.
Fair enough; the coalition is the new government, so it is allowed to have its own strategies and plans, but for God’s sake, it has been more than two years and it cannot even elaborate on them to the community. The community has every right to see that the legislation before this place is consistent with the government’s plans, but simply saying they are without demonstrating the existence of these plans is effectively an admission of failure by this government.
Somewhat curiously, Port Futures and Freight Futures do not appear on any government list as having existed or having been superseded or whatever. It is relatively safe to assume they no longer constitute part of the government’s policy, but it is almost like 1984 to see that they have been expunged from the public record.
This government’s much-lauded transport solutions plan first reared its head — I think over four years ago — as an integrated transport solutions plan the then coalition would progressively unveil when it was in government. That was done by the now Premier when he was Leader of the Opposition during the course of the 2008 Kororoit by-election. If it is going to be integrated and progressively released, it is going to be a very long wait for the people of Victoria, because it was to be developed with an aim of improving port, road and rail networks in Victoria, but the plan has effectively disappeared. No government MP, let alone a media release, has mentioned it this year.
The Victorian freight and logistics plan is due sometime in 2013. The fact that there are no plans means we see the government taking pieces of work partly completed by the previous government but not doing it in a way that effectively delivers the full value to the Victorian economy.
You cannot simply, as it were, slice away at good policy and hope those parts you do implement will in themselves constitute good policy. They need to be part of a broad mosaic underpinned by clear policy that provides not only certainty to the community but also certainty to the bureaucracy, which is charged with the responsibility of implementing the plan. If the bureaucracy does not know what the plans are, then those plans cannot be introduced.
I invite members to look at the outward demonstration of the so-called clear implementation of the government’s plans. The port of Melbourne expansion — once again a proposal initiated through the container capacity review by the previous government — seeks to extend the capacity of Webb Dock. The opposition has consistently said it does not oppose the expansion of Webb Dock in the terms proposed by the government, with one notable exception. That exception is this: the government needs to engage the local community around the way these matters are being dealt with.
Most importantly, the minister at the table, the Minister for Ports, would be well served to listen to the members for Albert Park and Williamstown, both of whom are not only very knowledgeable in these areas but also have constituencies greatly concerned about the way the development of this facility is implemented.
The point I make — and it is one I have made previously — is that the government cannot simply say, ‘We are going to develop the port of Melbourne and see its capacity increase to 5.5 million containers’, and have literally millions of extra truck movements on our freeway network if it does not make the necessary investment in road infrastructure, meaning how you manage the movement of vehicles and ultimately move towards a mode shift arrangement, not just road infrastructure enabling vehicles onto the freeway network.
The government would be well advised to come up with some strategies that make it clear to the people of Victoria that it has a plan beyond simply developing Webb Dock. It needs a plan to manage in an integrated sense the way our freight is moved. For the government to simply say the opposition opposes the bill is a shambolic and poorly thought through and advocated strategy. The government has not made its case to the people of Victoria, and it is important that this case be made. It is important for the economic wellbeing of this state that freight be effectively moved around the community but also that the community have some ownership of the infrastructure that is built.
Who can forget the minister at the table in opposition railing against the injustice and failure of the former government to invest in infrastructure when trucks were
Page 3028
being put onto roads? We know the total contribution made by this government on metropolitan arterial roads in the last budget was less than $4 million of new capital spend. This figure is an indictment of a government that takes the opportunity to knock in opposition but does nothing to substantively improve the situation in government. It demonstrates a gobsmacking level of cynicism.
We cannot forget the revelation made on 8 June this year when the Premier announced via a media release that the cost of the port expansion had increased from $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion. A $400 million cost blow-out should not be something that simply passes by the way.
Dr Napthine — There is no cost blow-out.
Mr PALLAS— The minister at the table tells us there is no cost blow-out: ‘We just forgot to take into account that we were actually going to have to relocate the vehicle facilities’. Goodness; imagine that! You have to relocate the vehicle facilities, but it is not a cost blow-out, ‘It’s just something that occurred to us subsequently’. If you want any further demonstration that this is a government of shambolic decision making, a government that not only cannot manage money but has not got a clue about policy and, for that matter, cannot even accept that policy has a substantive role to play in terms of good governance, this is it.
There was a $400 million cost blow-out for this expansion, and the government attributed that decision as to why the car trade to Geelong would not be moved. The minister at the table should have listened to me in the months before the announcement when I told him it was not going to happen and could not happen.
Anybody who had a vague clue about how ports and freight interact would not have proceeded down this march of folly and would have recognised that this was a foolhardy course of action and a cruel hoax on the people of Geelong.
We warned the minister at the table and the Premier about it but not because we wanted to break the hearts of the people of Geelong. We wanted to let them down gently, because this minister was going to let them down from a very great height. Once again it is a demonstration of this government’s vision. In terms of the performance and application of this bill, one’s expectations are not very high, because we understand that this is in part the legislative embodiment of the government’s vision. In many ways it demonstrates how shambolic, piecemeal and poorly integrated and thought through the bill actually is.
Turning to the idea that the government could extend the capacity of the port of Melbourne but make absolutely no provision for the management of traffic on the Monash and West Gate freeways, and for that matter the rest of the freeway network within metropolitan Melbourne, members would be well served to look at the announcements that were made.
When the minister was asked on radio, ‘What are you doing about traffic management?’, he said, ‘We’ll be putting a ramp onto the West Gate Bridge’. That is not a management plan. That is a plan for gridlock and nothing else. We already know that the projections on growth on the Monash-West Gate will see that road, within the next five years, carry some 200 000 vehicles a day. There are very few times in the day — —
Dr Napthine — You would support the east-west then?
Mr PALLAS— We of course support a second river crossing because, as Sir Rod Eddington — —
Dr Napthine interjected.
Mr PALLAS — The poor old minister only demonstrates his ignorance. What ignorance!
Honourable members interjecting.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order!
Mr PALLAS— Once again I want to demonstrate that here we have a government that is not prepared to make an investment where an investment is needed. The east-west link is a classic illustration.
If you look at the words of Sir Rod Eddington in his report, you see he makes it clear that the first thing you need to do is deal with a second river crossing because, as he said, the traffic and truck movements from that section across the Maribyrnong River are critically important, and the Labor Party’s position was, and remains, that in a $38 million, 12-year transport plan, there was no priority whatsoever for a cemetery link connection. There was no support for it, no commitment to it in $38 million and 12 years. You want to know what our position is? That is our position, loud and clear.
Dr Napthine — We still don’t know.
Mr PALLAS— Sorry, were you asleep?
Dr Napthine interjected.
Mr PALLAS— I know you have qualified for a pension card.
Page 3029
The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! The minister and the member for Tarneit will cease having a conversation across the table.
Mr PALLAS— Another demonstration of this government’s lack of clear vision, despite the purported use of clear vision in this legislation, is the fact that it extols the virtues of the port licence fee — a government in which the Premier got up and said, ‘You would be foolish to oppose a tax that industry supports’.
What did we find out about the views of industry? You would be surprised to see that in the correspondence provided to the Port of Melbourne Corporation industry almost unanimously made it incredibly clear that the $75 million per annum to be raised in the form of a port licence fee was not supported. The government said that the port licence would fund its vision, which seems to be to raise money and stifle trade with no actual projects in mind.
The port licence fee is nothing more than a revenue cash grab.
The port licence fee will damage the comparative competitiveness of the port of Melbourne, and the port licence fee is damaging the businesses of Victorian exporters, threatening Victorian jobs and, as was said consistently by one submitter after another to the Port of Melbourne Corporation in regard to its community and industry consultation around this issue, unlike the situation of the freight infrastructure charge proposed by the previous government, there was no effort or commitment to productivity-enhancing mode shift proposals, nor was there an investment or a firm commitment towards building infrastructure that would make the port more accessible to the industry and therefore improve its efficient operation.
It was a tax grab, pure and simple.
There was no commitment to apply the benefits of that cash grab effectively to the utility of the industry or indeed to the amenity of the community in and around the port — a port whose capacity will grow substantially between now and 2027 to 5.5 million containers, in the minister’s own view.
The port licence fee is strongly opposed by industry. Embarrassingly for the government, this is despite the Premier’s statement in Parliament on 8 February that it is supported by industry. The minister has acknowledged that the port licence fee will not be used to fund freight efficiency improvement projects but will instead be allocated to consolidated revenue.
Dr Napthine — It is exactly the same as yours.
Mr PALLAS— The freight infrastructure charge was only accounted for in the forward estimates up until 2016, but the government refused to include a sunset clause, despite the fact that it said it needed to put this charge in place because of the forward estimates allocation. Forward estimates only go for four years. The minister had the opportunity and he took it, pure and simple. He saw the cash and he dashed for it. It was a dash for cash, and nothing could be more demonstrative of the fact that — to use the minister’s own observation — far too often industry is not given a clear appreciation of what is happening. For the government to say it is taking funds and applying them not to projects but to consolidated revenue, as opposed to what the previous government did, which was effectively to identify a $38 million plan with pipeline
projects — —
Dr Napthine interjected.
Mr PALLAS — We hear from the minister at the table. What about the $10.3 billion that we allocated to transport? The minister demonstrates his ignorance every time he opens his mouth.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! The minister will cease interjecting; the member for Tarneit will not invite interjections.
Mr PALLAS— I think I was responding rather than inviting.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! The member for Tarneit, to continue.
Mr PALLAS— Clearly as a government what we see is dishonesty in terms of the cash grab that it has put in place, and dishonesty with the people of Victoria about its purported desire to deal with amenity when you balance the freight needs of the community.
We heard from the minister at the table time and again in opposition about how he was concerned about doing something in terms of super monster trucks, to use his words — I might say a term that nobody this side of the table has ever used. The minister consistently used that term to effectively create an expectation in the community that those opposite would do something to substantively assist the community.
What have they actually done? Effectively they have done nothing. We know they intend to develop the port of Hastings. We know that it will now be 15 years, not 8 years, and according to Treasury calculations it is a $12.4 billion net present value allocation. Of course the minister will dispute those figures, because he is a much better accountant than anyone in Treasury or the Department of Transport or Deloitte for that matter. I know he is a very wise man! For the record, that should be seen as sarcastic.
Page 3030
I want to be very clear that one cannot simply pull out these thought bubbles time and again and pretend that this is part of the government’s clear and consolidated strategy. A demonstration of a thought bubble is the idea that the minister would have super monster trucks travelling down freeways to the port of Hastings. Nothing could be more ludicrous or so far
removed — —
Dr Napthine — But I never said that.
Mr PALLAS— Yes you did. I have got you on television saying it.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! The member for Tarneit will address his remarks through the Chair.
Mr PALLAS— What we see from this government is time after time — —
Honourable members interjecting.
Mr Noonan — On a point of order, Deputy Speaker, on a number of occasions the Minister for Ports has referred to lies being told by members of the opposition. I believe in the past this has been deemed an unparliamentary use of language, and I ask that he withdraw.
The DEPUTY SPEAKER — Order! The Speaker has ruled that the words ‘lies’, ‘lying’ et cetera cannot be used, but the minister was not actually speaking to be recorded in Hansard. He was making asides.
Mr PALLAS — The reason the opposition does not oppose this bill is that essentially it does not do much.
I suppose it does make some sensible and reasonable adjustments to the existing port management scheme, as is outlined in the issues for consideration, and it continues to operate largely within the previous government’s 2009 Geelong port land use strategy. However, the idea of this small bill, as the minister describes it — it is small and one has to wonder why it has taken three and a half months for it to find its way onto the business paper of this place — is hardly a demonstration of the government’s clear, long-term vision for the development of commercial ports in Victoria.
We know that there is no vision in the context of any publically stated policies. We know the minister himself acknowledges that there are no policies on his own website, and indeed he continues to extol the noble and long-term strategy of the government of trying to work out a road safety slogan for our numberplates in Victoria! No doubt we will see that happen before the next election, it having taken the government only four years to work it out.
It is little wonder that the government does not do the hard work associated with developing serious policy and ultimately with long-term and substantial state-building infrastructure projects.
In many ways this bill effectively demonstrates three things. The safety and environment management plans (SEMP) and management strategies put in place will be streamlined and clarified — that is, there will be a clarification of the current arrangements of the SEMP procedure. That procedure outlined in the amendment bill is a valuable thing. In relation to planning at the port of Geelong, the bill confers responsibility for the development of the port development strategy — which is required under the statute to be delivered to the minister every four years — to the Victorian Regional Channels Authority. The opposition has no difficulty with that proposal.
Finally, the bill amends the definition of hazardous port activities to include the transfer of liquid fuel and other non-cargo liquids so that issues relating to those activities will no longer be dealt with separately from other hazardous port activities. The opposition has no difficulty with any of that, and in that context we will not be opposing the passage of this bill.
In relation to how the time of this Parliament is spent, at some point we hope to get the opportunity to talk about matters of substance that this government has in terms of a clearly elaborated policy. If you go to its website, you will see what we know to be true — that the Department of Transport has no idea what policies it is pursuing. If you look at development within the government of its integrated transport solutions, or its transport solutions plan, you will see that it seems to have disappeared from the public record. Even the minister at the table had the audacity to mention this some years ago, but it no longer exists on the public record.
We have to ask ourselves: what does this all mean? What is the direction in which the state of Victoria is going? What is the clear vision for transport that the minister lauds so strongly in this field? At the moment we are clearly within a policy void, and while we are in a policy void the people of Victoria have every right to see the cherry picking of particular projects and not around a broad objective as being damaging to the wellbeing of the state. However, on that basis, the opposition will not be opposing this bill.