GREG NASH, PROJECT DIRECTOR, TRANSPORT FOR NEW SOUTH WALES: Welcome to the Coffs Harbour bypass project, as I introduce the Minister for Infrastructure, Catherine King. It's great to have Catherine on site today to actually have a look at the project and see the progress of the works to date. And I'll introduce Catherine to talk about the milestone.

CATHERINE KING MP: Hi Catherine King, Federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport. Well, this is my first time on-site here at the Coffs Harbour Bypass. And can I just say to Greg and the team, we're so grateful for the incredible construction work that you're doing here on site. It's been really great for the local community. Lot of locals employed on this job here as well. Just met your receptionist before, she's a local as well. This has been a really important project for the region. We know that on the Pacific, this is the major road between Sydney and Brisbane, and for decades, the traffic slowing down, the huge volume of traffic coming through Coffs Harbour, has been a significant issue. The bypass has been talked about for years, and here we are today, major milestone of the Coffs Harbour Bypass. The tunnelling work is done, it is broken through, and now we can get on with the work of actually putting the pavement, the drainage and all of the signage in place, ready for the opening at the end of 2026, for cars to be on the bypass. You know, this has been a significant employer of people in the town, but what this really is going to do is give Coffs back its heart, allow thousands of trucks a day, thousands of cars a day, to come off and out of the main street of Coffs Harbour onto this road instead allowing that traffic to flow freely. But really give people back the heart of their town. We did it in Kempsey when we were last in government, that Kempsey bypass really delivered a lot for the people of Kempsey. And this is what we're doing here with Coffs Harbour. This is a $2.2 billion project, mostly funded by the federal Albanese Labor government, in partnership with the New South Wales government, who are the delivery partners here. And as I said, I want to really commend the work that has been done here on this project. You can really see just how much time and effort goes into something that is a complex piece of engineering, but will deliver really significant economic benefits for the community, not just of Coffs Harbour, but all of the communities who use what is really the one of the arteries and spines of our national land transport network. I'm happy to answer any questions, Greg's here also to answer any of the more technical project delivery questions.

JOURNALIST: You have come here for the first time. This is a pretty specky time to come to see this. Were you expecting it to be just like this?

CATHERINE KING: I didn't realise how huge this project is. When you see the workers compound, just the size and scale of it, you know, there's a lot of projects, I've been to a couple of those this week already to see different train projects, different road projects, but when you're in a in a rural area, to see a project of this size, I think it's probably I'd have to go back and check one of the biggest regional and rural projects we've got in partnership with the State and Territory Government at the moment, and just a real tribute to the real skill of the workforce that are here doing such an enormous job.

JOURNALIST: In terms of this milestone, how does this exactly reflect the project as a whole workforce?

CATHERINE KING: Well, in terms of the percentages, I'll get the experts to sort of answer that. But this is sort of the big scale civil engineering works. You know, when you think about a road or a rail project, often what you see is, you know, excavators coming in, and they're moving dirt about a lot, and that's really the first part of it. What we've had to do here is blast through hills, or get through hills, in order to actually start. Now they’re more into the construction phase really. This is really the big part of the end of the Civil Engineering part, where we've actually got the work done to start actually building the road that cars and trucks are going to go through. So it's a big milestone in terms of one phase of the project, the big civil engineering phase of the project, finished and done. And now we'll get on to the actual construction phase of getting the road built, and you’ll really start to see that work underway over the course of the next six to 12 months. Greg, is it sort of halfway through?

GREG NASH: The project’s nearly two thirds the way through, and it's a major milestone for the project, you know, converting from tunnelling now into civil works. We'll start, you know, fitting out these tunnels. We're doing a structural lining, waterproofing. Then we actually start doing the pavements. Then we'll start doing the fire systems, all the mechanical electrical systems in the tunnels, all the safety cameras and so forth. So there's a lot of work still to go over the next 12 months, but this is a pretty major milestone, completing this major excavation of the tunnels.

JOURNALIST: In terms of the tunnels, like, how much, how hard was it to dig through? What's the sort of scope of the dirt and all that sort of thing removed.

GREG NASH: A lot of material’s been moved on the project. All hard rock, extremely hard rock, unlike in Sydney, which is sandstone, where they use TBMs and so forth. This is a hard arch-like rock. It requires drill and blast. So we're just incrementally going through what is called a heading, of drill and blaster, a heading through, and then we come back and take out the bench section as well. So again, it’s all drill and blast of hard rock, 600,000 cubic meters of material that comes out of this tunnel. So it's a lot of work.

JOURNALIST: Mr. Nash, just on the use of explosive blasting. Is that officially wrapped up now that the tunnelling process has been completed?

GREG NASH: Pretty much like we're just finishing off the benching, which is, there's some blast in the benching, and we'll complete that very shortly, and then blasting in the tunnels complete, we're about to move on some more blasting in the civil works, on the road cutting. We've got another blast this weekend, which is one of our last major blasts on the project. But we still use blasting as a tool to actually move hard rock in some of the cuts.

JOURNALIST: In terms of the other tunnels, where are they up to for the work that will then go into this one?

GREG NASH: Yeah, so the other tunnel, Gatelys Road tunnel, is more advanced, so we’ve actually seen that breakthrough last year in November. We're actually now completing the structural lining. We're about to hand it over to the civil team, so we'll start building the road pavement through that tunnel so that one's most advanced, that's the longest tunnel. Shephards Lane tunnel, we're actually completing the waterproofing the strip drains, drainage in that tunnel right now, and it'll be the next tunnel going to be ready. This is the last tunnel that will be last time that will complete the completion over to the civil team.

JOURNALIST: What are we seeing in terms of other areas of the project? I mean, north of Korora there's always things changing there, and even Englands Road. 

GREG NASH: yeah, you're seeing a lot of change at the moment. Up north of Korora, you're seeing some traffic switches in end of June, early July, where we've moved the traffic to the west and through the interchange. There's another traffic switch happening today at Coramba Road, where we're actually moving traffic over the interchange itself. And then in the south, at Englands Road, we've had a number of traffic switches to actually move the traffic to the west as well. So again, we've been moving through those traffic switches pretty quickly and on program, so we can actually get access to the eastern side of the highway to start completing the build of the motorway in the centre section of the road.

JOURNALIST: What's the next big milestone, I guess, not just for the tunnels, but for the whole project?

GREG NASH: The next big milestone is really getting the paving on, in what we call the greenfield section, from bridge two, from Englands Road, right through to Shephards Lane. Now, next target milestone to get the asphalt paving right through this section where we are right now.

JOURNALIST: What's the estimated date of completion for that?

GREG NASH: So for that work, we're actually targeting to have it done by early next year, just getting that paving going. And then there'll be more paving going right through the whole project over the next, over the next 18 months, and more or less. But it's a real, it's just more of the more of the same, just rolling out asphalt throughout the whole project.

JOURNALIST: And obviously we've got the bridges and the sound walls, they all sort of happen simultaneously?

GREG NASH: So we try and finish off all the works at the same time. So we try and finish the landscaping. So built from the bottom right up, complete landscaping, noise walls, street lighting, signage, all the ITS conduits go through. So everything gets wrapped up. So when we open the traffic, it's all it's all ready to go. We don't want to go back in there. End of 2026 we want to have this greenfield section bypassing Coffs Harbour, and it's all complete, we don't want to come back into this section. We'll be focusing on the southern and the northern section of the project and just doing the completion works.

JOURNALIST: I'm sure there's been some really valued engineers that specialize in tunneling that have been working throughout this project. Are they wrapping up their contracts.

GREG NASH: Now there's still some legacy works that we've got going on here with that team. We've got about 140 really great tunnellers working on this project, and we've been excited to actually see the progress that tunnelling team's made across this project. And they will come to a completion shortly, and then we'll be sending all that work over to a civil team to actually complete.

JOURNALIST: Have we seen any response from the community at all how they feel about the progress of the bypass so far?

GREG NASH: Every time I talk to the community, they're excited about seeing the bypass come along. They're seeing a lot of change, especially in the north and south, where it's easy access and on the highway, they see that change happening quite regularly. So I get a lot of good feedback about the progress of the project and people seeing change week on week.

JOURNALIST: The wet weather is obviously a pain in the bum for everyone that's working outdoors. But how's it treating the guys?

GREG NASH: Yeah, it has been a wet six months. There's no doubt that that's been, that's been challenging. The project team's been working extremely well to try and safeguard the project, make sure we can get back and recover works, get back onto the project as soon as possible. So they've done a great job in doing that and keeping us on track with all those milestones and keep churning out all those traffic switches that we’ve been seeing.

CATHERINE KING: Anything else? Beautiful, great. Thank you.