Mr FITZGIBBON —Within a couple of hundred metres of one another in my electorate are two intersections with an unacceptably high accident history. In August of last year, the former land transport minister, the member for Kingsford-Smith, Mr Brereton, visited the area where the New England Highway meets Weakleys Drive and Thornton Road, and announced that $11 million would be spent rectifying the problems. The money was to be used to fund a number of measures, including a grade separated interchange and a road directly linking the townships of Beresfield and Thornton in order that the residents of those townships need not access the busy national highway in order to move from one town to another.

Members can appreciate how surprised I was when in July of this year the member for Paterson (Mr Bob Baldwin) wandered uninvited into my electorate and announced that some $412,000 would be spent installing two sets of traffic lights at those very dangerous intersections. My first question is: where is the other $10.5 million? Since there already exists one set of traffic lights where Anderson Drive meets the New England Highway, we will have the ridiculous situation where we have three sets of traffic lights within about half a kilometre of one another on one of the busiest stretches of the national highway. This is a crazy situation and I impress upon the Minister for Transport and Regional Development (Mr Sharp) the need to ensure that the lights should be an interim measure only and that in the near future proper remedial measures be funded entirely. Why is this occurring? This is occurring because the federal government has cut $640 million—(Time expired)