Mr IAN MACFARLANE (10:35 PM) —At 1.20 p.m. on Friday, 17 June an unguided missile struck the bottom of the Toowoomba Range. A B-double in excess of 50 tonnes careered out of control down the range, and it was only through God's grace that no-one was killed. It is in fact through God's grace that we do not have a new crossing over the Toowoomba Range. To explain that a little better, it is because we do not have the fatality rate on the Toowoomba Range Crossing in comparison to other roads in Queensland that we have not yet attracted the level of funding we require to build a new crossing.

We have a situation where the biggest inland city in Australia bar Canberra—and who would bar Canberra?—was isolated from the coast and from the capital city of its state for nine hours on Friday afternoon because we have an antiquated, out-of-date, dangerous, slow and easily clogged arterial road into that city. The road into Toowoomba not only is of those descriptions but also serves all of western Queensland, northern New South Wales and the Northern Territory. We have a vehicle rate which would secure with any sort of associated fatality rate a new road in anyone's mind. We have a road which secures the economic growth of a region, yet without the fatality rate fails to attract the level of support from the state government which will require the Department of Transport and Regional Services in Canberra to urge the minister here to give it adequate funding.

The sum of money required to see Toowoomba given a road which will stop semitrailers at the rate of thousands a day being pumped into the city causing road congestion, air pollution, noise pollution and a denigration of the city's beauty and social atmosphere is $220 million. Until we as a government, with the support hopefully of the state government and the local authorities in Queensland, decide that it is time to change the basis of the formula which will allow us to be given a road we so aptly deserve, Toowoomba will continue to sit on top of one of the most tortuous access roads in Australia. Until we see a situation where the economic needs of a region are put in front of simple statistics, Toowoomba will continue to have one of the worst access roads I have seen in Australia.

The Toowoomba Range Crossing was put in with horses; in fact, it is probably horses which are best suited to use it. It is a road which once a year I transverse in a truck as part of National Heavy Transport Safety Week, and it is a road which, if traversed safely, one goes down at about 10 kilometres an hour. If you have a truck with sufficient horsepower, you may exceed that speed coming up but, as oft is the case, trucks crawl up and down that range at around that speed.

What will happen with that road over the next five years is that, like a dying man's arteries, it will slowly clog. As it clogs, minor incidents will continue to occur until we have a situation where a fatality or multiple fatality occurs. How we avoided that situation on Friday is beyond me. As I said, a 50-tonne truck completely out of control careered down the range, crossed the median strip, tore out the barrier and came into the path of oncoming vehicles. Fortunately, the only vehicle it struck was another semitrailer taking evasive action, and together they careered off the side of the road. An unfortunate driver of a small delivery van was struck by a flying cow, which may strike some humour were it not for the seriousness of the situation.

The reality is the only fatalities that day were in fact the cows. A B-double loaded with cattle was sprawled across the roads and animals were in great distress. Were that a human carnage, we would have seen the new road virtually immediately. Mr Speaker, I put it to you that this government with the support of the state and all authorities should act before those dead cows become dead people.