Page 2241 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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paradigm”, I am sure, will look good on a green brochure in about 70 weeks time. But it does not answer the questions and it does not hold water.
This road should be upgraded first and foremost to make it safe. And if you cannot make the existing winding structure safe then of course you will need to shift it.
Whenever we build anything, it does impact on the environment. But you also have to look at the environment that it is in. It is an area that has been heavily farmed and heavily used for a long, time. As I was reminded, a lot of the remnant ecological values are actually those pockets of grassland or forest that line the existing road, as with so many areas across Australia. The bits that never got farmed, that is, the bits outside the fences of the farms that line the roads, are the pieces of territory that actually do retain a lot of the ecological values. I would have thought Mr Rattenbury, before he got up and wanted to shift the transport paradigm, would have read the EIS and understood that this is being discussed quite heavily in the document, as I was reminded.
There is a false promise here. He talked about the false promise about solving the problem and about the vague promises. At the end of the day, this is a city. This is a city that needs to function. I think we are all interested in transport options. But at the end of the day, the existing road is beyond its capacity, it is not safe and it needs to be upgraded.
Mr Rattenbury talked about smoothing the traffic flows. “Let us address the traffic flows.” I do not see how you can address the traffic flows on a road that is basically full at peak hour without making it a dual carriageway. If it is a dual carriageway and you want to do that on the existing alignment, then of course you are going to eat into the areas that have the most ecological values in that valley. Normally if somebody had proposed eating into an area with very high ecological values the Greens would be aghast. “Don’t. Save it. Save whatever it is.” But that is exactly what Mr Rattenbury, in his shifting the paradigm speech, has suggested.
He bagged other members for not doing their homework. Perhaps Mr Rattenbury, the Green, the self-confessed saviour of the environment, ought to do his homework before he comes in. Perhaps he would like to get some scientific values before he stands there in his sanctimonious way, as he always does, and tell us we are all wrong because we are not green. And that is the problem with the approach of the Greens. It is blinkered. It is blind. What they are proposing destroys what is left of the remanent environment in the Majura Valley. How is that for an irony?
He puts up people’s safety. He says, “We will address traffic flows.” That sounds to me like passing lanes. He could not bring himself to say, “We will make it four lanes for the entire length of the valley.” It either means passing lanes or overtaking areas. So we are going to have bottlenecks. What do bottlenecks do? You speed up, you slow down, you speed up, you slow down. People take chances, people take risks, people get injured and people die.
Why not just accept that occasionally you actually do have to build a new road? Why not just accept that the right thing here, in a city whose population has grown, not just
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