PRUE BENTLEY, HOST: Now, there is some big news for communities along the Western Highway corridor. After years of delays caused by cultural heritage concerns, hundreds of crashes and dozens of fatalities in the region over that time, upgrade works will begin on a notorious stretch of it by the end of the year. Catherine King is the Member for Ballarat and Infrastructure Minister, and I caught up with her earlier today. Catherine King, there’s money in both state and federal budgets for this project to continue. After all of these delays, can you be confident construction will begin this year?  

MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORT, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT CATHERINE KING: Yes, we can. I’ve just been on site with the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Agency and the people who are managing and delivering this project. Contracts are due in September and construction to start this year. I know the community’s been waiting a long time for this project. We had the Cultural Heritage Plan approved this year and now we’ve put the additional money in. In the Budget on Tuesday night, the Albanese Labor Government’s put an additional $372.5 million in. The Allan Labor Government’s put $73.5 million in, taking this up to a $1.17 billion project between Buangor and Ararat to bring those new passing lanes in and the new alignment. It deals with the issues around the trees that we obviously had significant protests around that has significantly delayed the project, but we’re confident that construction should start this year.  

BENTLEY: So, as you say, the section between Buangor and Stawell – will it fully duplicate that section?  

KING: No, it’s the section between Buangor and Ararat, so it will do that section, and that’s what we’re concentrating on. That’s been the area where we obviously saw four people lose their lives in the last five years. There’s been over 13 serious accidents in that stretch alone, so obviously we want to do and continue the work along the Western Highway, but this project’s the one that’s been on the books for a long period of time. We really just want to get it done.  

BENTLEY: Why is it not a full duplication?  

KING: Again, it comes down to costs, and it’s disappointing in the sense that I’ve been the Member in Ballarat for a long period of time. We started the work when the Prime Minister was the infrastructure minister. I’ve got photos of me, a very young politician, with John Brumby and Bracks doing the first start of the duplication. It was meant to be a rolling program and basically the Liberal Party neglected it for 10 years. And so, really, we’ve got to get on with the work of where we can fix it, where we’ve got money available to start duplicating and fixing it now. This is one of the projects that’s ready to go. But we’ll continue investing in the Western Highway. We’ve got, well, as a Federal Government, over a billion dollars in the Western Freeway and Western Highway projects and we’re going to keep working on this road to make it safer for everybody.  

BENTLEY: And you will continue that work beyond Ararat into Stawell as well?  

CATHERINE KING: Well, when budgets allow us to do and the Victorian state government together, we obviously work in partnership as co-investors in these projects and when those projects are ready, that’s why I changed the way in which funding is delivered. We fund the corridor here, so we put money into the corridor and we hope that those projects will continue when the Victorian Government’s ready to do so. They’ll come forward to me in future budgets and we’ll make decisions then.  

BENTLEY: Catherine King, when do you think it’ll be finished?  

KING: In terms of Buangor to Ararat, that’s a question really for the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Agency. It’ll depend, but there’s been a lot of planning going to this project, so we don’t have to do any more planning or design work. That work’s all done. That often can take the longest period of time, as we’ve seen. I would expect construction to take around 18 months but that of course depends on whether we have significant wet weather events.  

BENTLEY: Just while I’ve got you Catherine King, as Infrastructure Minister this week in the Budget you’ve made the decision not to continue with the Inland Rail project from Queensland through to Victoria. So crucial to primary producers as I’m sure you’ve heard, and reducing road freight. But you are putting money into the controversial Suburban Rail Loop in Melbourne. Why is that?   

KING: Well, they’re all different projects and we make infrastructure investment decisions, so it’s not an either-or. With Inland Rail, what we found, this is again, a National Party project that when we came to office, I basically had the Australian Rail Track Corporation say to me, we’re going to need a lot more money to do this. The previous government had provisioned, I think, originally $9 billion and then $16 billion to deliver the entire project from the Port of Melbourne without any planning work done, no idea how it was going to get there, all the way through to the Port of Brisbane. And the Australian Rail Track Corporation couldn’t tell me how much it was going to cost. So, we brought in one of the most prominent infrastructure experts to actually tell us what she thought, what we should do. She told us to prioritise getting Inland Rail to Parkes and then do the work to find out how much it was going to cost beyond that. We’ve now done that work. We’ve had an actuarial company come in and do and test all of the propositions and basically said to us the entire project is now at $45 billion. It is just not value for money. It is not financially viable for us to continue with a project like that. What we will do is preserve the corridor. Getting it to Parkes allows freight, double-stack freight now to get through from Melbourne from Beveridge to Perth. We’ve started construction on the Beveridge Intermodal Terminal.

We’ll preserve the corridor but we’ve really invested in freight rail as well. What we’ve done is redirected some of the debt equity from Inland Rail, redirected over $1.7 billion of that to actually fix the Australian Rail Track Corporation freight network that’s ageing, well over 100 years now to actually get more freight moving, and that will definitely benefit primary producers across the country. Those improvements in the rail freight network will happen immediately and hopefully mean that we’ve got less time that that’s actually shut down. In the same time as part of the Infrastructure Investment Program, we have states come to us with projects all the time. Suburban Rail Loop is not funded from debt, Inland Rail was. We’ve taken the decision to continue our investment. We’ve already invested $2.2 billion in suburban rail because that will really change not just the way people move around Melbourne but provide that opportunity for new housing in those critical areas around Burwood and Monash where we’re seeing such huge population growth. So, two very separate projects, and we’ve got to make the decisions based on the facts that we’ve got before us.  

BENTLEY: Catherine King, thank you for your time.  

KING: Good to be with you, Prue.