Mr McARTHUR (1:25 PM) —As an active member of the Standing Committee on Communications, Transport and the Arts, I commend the Back on track report to the parliament. I also actively participated in the Tracking Australia report of 1998, which was a landmark report in railway reform for Australia. That report particularly identified rail freight, the above and below line structures and the inadequacies of a number of rail lines throughout Australia. It noted the good operations of the east-west rail from Melbourne to Perth and the poor operations of the Melbourne to Brisbane north-south line. In particular, the Tracking Australia report noted the Perth-Melbourne line, which has 74 per cent of the freight traffic. That is the highest percentage figure in the world for rail freight traffic compared with road. That particular railway runs through the heartlands of Corangamite and we can see, day by day, the effectiveness of that rail line—where the private sector has operated and where there are good, improved rail structures. Privatisation has been identified, with Freight Victoria now injecting capital into the Victorian system and opening up new railways that cart logs from Bairnsdale to Geelong. We can see SCT, again a private operation, operating out of Laverton.

The three reports, Tracking Australia, the Smorgon report and the Productivity Commission report, identified much the same problems in Australian railways. I would just like to quote the sorts of things they identified:

· land transport planning;

· increased investment in the interstate track;

· better management of and access to the interstate track;

· competitive neutrality between private and government owned operators;

· competitive neutrality between road and rail;

· fragmentation of schemes providing access to rail infrastructure; and

· inconsistent operational and safety regimes.

The setting up of the Australian Rail Track Corporation to provide access is a step in the right direction, although there are obviously concerns about the price and the ability of that particular corporation to operate effectively as it is fairly new. As the chairman, the member for Hinkler, has said to the parliament, we are recommending that $250 million be invested in rail infrastructure over four years—a minuscule amount compared to the vast amounts of money that are put into roadworks. The committee are very happy with the government's proposition to sell National Rail so that those operators who purchase National Rail will be in the private sector.

The report identifies a very important feature—that railways have long not been able to prepare in advance, having had their `plans in the drawer', so to speak. We saw situations where, when the track was standardised, old life-expired rail was put back on old sleepers. So we want to overcome that sort of problem. We need to have harmonised relationships between historically run state operations, where radio and signalling are standardised in a Commonwealth way. By way of comparison, if the states controlled the airspace, where Ansett and Qantas were using state-by-state regulations, we could see the chaos that would emerge from that. We need to make sure that access to the rail systems is known and that accreditation is at a federal level. We draw a comparison between the national highway system, where trucks can drive from Cairns to Perth having one type of situation.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Nehl)—Order! The time allotted for statements on this report has expired. Does the member for Hinkler wish to move a motion in connection with the report to enable it to be debated on a future occasion?