Mr LLOYD (5:15 PM) —Today, I take the opportunity in the grievance debate to continue my discussion on the difficulty of providing good and free-flowing road transport from Sydney to the northern areas of New South Wales and to Queensland—in fact, right through as far as Cairns. It is not a new issue. In fact, one of the first works undertaken by the Main Roads Board of New South Wales was the construction of a direct road link between Sydney and Newcastle. For honourable members who are not familiar with the terrain north of Sydney, it is some of the more difficult terrain. It is national park, it is very hilly and a major river, the Hawkesbury River, has to be crossed. Unlike near some other cities in Australia, the land is not flat and it has always been difficult to get free-flowing road transport to the north of Sydney.

The demand for direct road access to the north arose in 1913 and persisted into the early 1920s. At that stage, there were two very roundabout routes from Sydney to Newcastle—one of them was the Great North Road via Wiseman's Ferry, which was some 165 miles in those days. In fact, so rough and arduous were the driving conditions on the two roads in 1924 that the National Roads and Motorists' Association, the NRMA, advised motorists to ship their vehicles to Newcastle if they intended to go north. Things have improved over the years! On 6 March 1925, an appeal was made to the Main Roads Board of New South Wales by the Erina Shire Council, a forerunner of the Gosford City Council. A large well-attended conference at Gosford on 6 June 1925 called for access to be provided on a road link from Sydney through to Gosford. Of course, once the road link was there, the Hawkesbury River had to be crossed. At that time they used vehicular ferries—the George Peat and the Frances Peat—and a daily traffic report for the 12 months ended 12 August 1931 showed that there had been 1,118 passengers and 508 vehicles. Things have increased slightly since then. As I said, it is not a new issue.

The F3 freeway is, of course, the major arterial link from Sydney to Newcastle and on to Brisbane—in fact, virtually every vehicle heading north has to use the F3. In March 1960, they advertised for offers to construct the first section of the F3 and on 15 December 1965—some 36 years ago—5.8 miles of the F3, from the Hawkesbury River to Mount White, were opened as a tollway. A second section of 3.4 miles, from Mount White to Calga, was opened on 28 October 1966, and on 12 December 1968 a section from Berowra to the Hawkesbury River, 6.3 miles, was opened. Obviously the freeway has been progressively expanded and extended over that period and the traffic flow has continued to increase as residential areas and businesses have moved north into rapidly growing areas such as the Central Coast of New South Wales. In fact, the F3 freeway is now the most heavily trafficked road anywhere in Australia.

Figures show that to maintain a free-flowing traffic run on the F3, the maximum capacity of the road is around 1,800 vehicles per hour. The maximum flow on the freeway is now close to 4,000 per hour. It never makes that number during peak hours, when it becomes a very long traffic jam, particularly on a Friday afternoon—when you have the combination of commuters heading out of Sydney trying to get home to Gosford or Wyong and the holiday or weekend traffic—and a Sunday afternoon, when people are heading back to Sydney. It is something that is very important to the people of the Central Coast and to the people of New South Wales. As honourable members would know, earlier today I tabled a petition in the House with some 11,733 signatures on it. I wanted to elaborate a little more on that issue now because time did not permit earlier. It is a significant petition. It was collected in a relatively short period, some three to four months. It involved mainly Central Coast residents but there were contributions from all over New South Wales.

I particularly want to thank the many hundreds of people who took petitions, copied them and sent them to friends and relatives around New South Wales and the businesses that organised to have petitions in their businesses. I would also like to thank many elements of the local media, particularly the Central Coast Express Advocate which ran front page articles to support the campaign to widen the F3. We still do not have a result. A lot of work is being done and the federal government has been very good in providing $500,000 to look at design costings and feasibility plans and $10 million for an electronic management system on the freeway. The freeway is managed by the RTA and the New South Wales state government and I am disappointed that the New South Wales government has spent only $3 million of the $10 million available to provide that electronic information system for drivers. It would be good if they would upgrade that system so that it is more accurate and more useful to motorists.

The feasibility study has shown that just to widen the section of freeway at Mount White where it goes from three lanes into two lanes, which is the major bottleneck, would cost in the vicinity of $80 million. It is a lot of money, but it is something that has to be done not just for Central Coast residents but for all of New South Wales and all of Australia. It is the main arterial road link north of Sydney. There is no alternative. I continue to call on the federal government to provide that money to allow the freeway to be widened.

I want to raise another issue briefly while I have time, in relation to the Mangrove Mountain Newcastle disease outbreak. I am concerned that, whilst the farmers there have recovered to a great extent and the industry is just about to get back on its feet, the New South Wales government has now claimed that the farmers at Mangrove Mountain have to pay back the clean-up costs of that horrific outbreak of disease. The facts are simple. Under the Commonwealth-state cost sharing agreement for emergency animal diseases that was invoked at the time, the federal government paid 50 per cent of the cost and the rest was shared by the other states and territories, which meant that the New South Wales government paid approximately 20 per cent of the total costs. The New South Wales government had an opportunity to include in those cost plans the clean-up costs of this outbreak but it did not do that. It said that the industry and the farmers had to make a contribution to clean-up costs. In earlier disease emergency responses in other states and in the 1997 avian influenza outbreak at Tamworth in New South Wales, the clean-up costs have been included and the total costs were shared under that cost sharing agreement.

During the Deans Park outbreak, the New South Wales government made the decision that the poultry farmers should bear the cost, and again in the Mangrove Mountain outbreak the New South Wales government made the decision that the poultry farmers should bear the costs of the clean-up. It is now sending bills of something like $20,000 to $30,000 to many of the farmers in the Mangrove Mountain area, some 12 months or longer after the outbreak. The farmers there cannot afford to pay these bills. They are only just starting to get back on their feet after what has been the most serious outbreak of Newcastle disease ever to occur in Australia. I appeal to the New South Wales government to waive those clean-up cost bills to allow the farmers of Mangrove Mountain to get on with their industry, which employs so many thousands of people on the Central Coast. I again make it very clear that the New South Wales government could have included those costs in the cost sharing agreement between the federal government and the other state governments and those costs would have been paid, and it should not now come back to the farmers and ask them to pay those clean-up costs.