Inland Rail Project Cancellation

Yes, well I've been building this for some time. It's about 1600 kilometres long and the big attraction of this is that for a start you could have 1.8 kilometre long double stack train. Double stack means one container on top of the other. So you've got a 40 foot container on top of another 40 foot which you can't do on the coast because of all the tunnels and overhead wires and things over the tracks where it's going. But out there you could. So you've got farmers in Midwest. West New South Wales who could grow veggies and flowers and then get them up to the new World Camp airport at Toowoomba and fly them into Singapore within 48 hours. They have a whole new market that they would never have dreamed about, whereas the moment they've got to be trucked to Sydney and then got on a plane in Sydney, it's not nearly as feasible. So this was a really exciting project for farmers and of course the government now has said, well... It was supposed to cost $20 billion. It's now up to $30 billion with expected cost for another $40 billion, a lot of it because of the cost of some of the regulation and green tape and red tape involved in acquiring properties in Midwestern New South Wales going through national parks and state forests. And the government has just said, no, it looks too expensive. We're not going to do it anymore. They've got little bits of it built, but there are some key bits in the middle that aren't, which make the bits they built almost useless. They're not going to stop acquiring land because the National Party and the opposition has said that as soon as they get elected, they will immediately recommence it because they do have a real base in rural Australia. Whereas the Labour Party really don't have a base there, they don't get any votes there, they care about it really, and therefore it's in their interest to say, well let's save that money and put it in the NDIS or one of the other schemes that's their pet scheme.