Mr BAIRD —My question is addressed to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and Regional Services. Would the Deputy Prime Minister inform the House about the federal government's commitment to upgrading the interstate mainline track and in particular the government's approach to addressing the significant rail congestion problems throughout Sydney.

Mr ANDERSON (Deputy Prime Minister) —I thank the honourable member for his question. The government is very committed to revitalising rail in Australia. We are planning for the future because it is estimated that our total freight task will double over the next two decades. We cannot have all of that on our roads. We are going to need rail, and we have got an investment package of around $250 million of Commonwealth money, which is being usefully leveraged up all over the country to upgrade the interstate mainline track.

The member who asked the question—who, of course, was an extremely good minister for transport in New South Wales—would be well aware that, at this point in time, there is no dedicated freight line through Sydney at all. I recently announced that around half of the federal government's contribution of $250 million in the rail investment program—that is to say, $124 million—will go towards a long overdue dedicated freight line through Sydney. At the moment, trains can wait for up to 24 hours for the lines to be free of passenger trains. You get massive backlogs, and indeed all of this simply encourages people to put their freight back onto trucks and onto our already congested roads.

The total cost of the particular exercise we are talking about here could be anywhere between $500 million and $1 billion, so there is an opportunity for the government's funding to be used to leverage up funding from other sources, quite possibly for a BOOT type arrangement—build, own, operate and transfer. A study by Maunsell-McIntyre to investigate options is under way at the moment and will be completed shortly.

I do urge the current New South Wales Minister for Transport to get behind the construction of the line and to recognise the importance of improving access through Sydney. This is vitally important. We have made real progress in fixing up the east-west corridor; in fact, it now has a very high percentage of the freight between Perth and Melbourne. We have been doing things properly. Under a program called One Nation, strangely enough, the ALP put some money into rail. They put taxpayers' money into a stretch of rail on the track at Pura Pura because the average train speed was down to about 70 kilometres an hour. When they had finished doing it up a la Labor Party reform, the trains travelled at about 25 kilometres an hour. We have been getting on with the job.

Mr Crean interjecting—

Mr ANDERSON —It's true; go and check it. After you had fixed up the railways the trains went slower. Now we have to get the north-south corridor working properly—that is, Melbourne, Sydney, in between and beyond. But I do emphasise this: when it comes to dispersing this money—it is a very important point—for projects in New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland, until those states conclude satisfactory arrangements with the Australian Rail Track Corporation for single point operations for interstate access, we will not be handing over the money. I again call on the New South Wales Minister for Transport, Carl Scully, to get on with meeting his commitments—to finalise ar rangements with the ARTC and get on with the job of upgrading the track in New South Wales.