Building a highway to recovery

Promising to build roads is a political favourite at any election and the Queensland Liberal National Party has wasted no time with its bid to outflank the state Labor government on the issue. The starting gun has yet to be fired on the campaign proper for the October 31 state poll but LNP leader Deb Frecklington has pledged a 15-year, $33bn upgrade of the Bruce Highway linking Brisbane and Cairns that will be 80 per cent funded by the federal government. Premier Annastacia Palas­zczuk has cried foul, saying her government already has a deal with Canberra to spend $12.6bn on improving the highway across the next 15 years.

Politics aside, Ms Frecklington has a good cause. It is a longstanding disgrace that Australia’s most decentralised state remains unserviced by a decent intrastate motorway. The success of former LNP premier Campbell Newman in pushing through road tunnel infrastructure to arrest traffic congestion in Brisbane has amplified a city-versus-regions divide for the nearly 55 per cent of Queenslanders who live outside the state capital. Flood-prone and mostly two lanes, the Bruce Highway is dangerous for users and a handbrake on state development. A Bruce Highway upgrade scheme began on July 1, 2013, when Mr Newman was premier, with a rolling program of projects to be completed by June 2028. Before the 2017 election, the Queensland ALP committed to a Bruce Highway Trust to identify and prioritise projects to be delivered through a series of five-year action plans.

For the coming election, the LNP has pledged to turn the entire 1650km of highway between Brisbane and Cairns into a four-lane dual carriageway. Road spending will be popular in the regions and no doubt has been promised by the LNP with electoral advantage in mind.

As Jamie Walker has outlined, the road cuts through or borders 14 marginal electorates in provincial Queensland, eight of them held by Labor and two more by minor parties that will be targeted by the LNP. The remaining four LNP seats under 5 per cent are on the ALP’s priority list to deliver Ms Palaszczuk a third term. The “highway marginals” in play include Labor-held Townsville with a knife-edge margin of 0.38 per cent, the LNP seat of Burdekin based on the sugar town of Ayr (0.8 per cent), Mackay-based Whitsunday held by expelled LNP MP turned independent Jason Costigan (0.68 per cent), One Nation’s seat of Mirani north of Rockhampton (4.82 per cent) and Labor-held Maryborough (2.46 per cent).

Regardless of politics, the project has merit. A blueprint for the upgrade can be found in the quarter-century project to improve the Pacific Highway between Sydney and Brisbane. The Pacific Highway upgrade was started in 1996 amid outcries over public safety. It is now 90 per cent complete and has achieved a 70 per cent reduction in fatal crashes and cut travel times between the two capitals by 2½ hours. As recently as 1958 sections of the Pacific Highway were still dirt.

Infrastructure is the business of government and completing a world-class highway the length of the east coast from Melbourne to Cairns should be high on the list of priorities. With interest rates low and the need high for nation-building projects to boost employment, a Queensland road plan should have wide support.