THE Nationals say north-west Victoria’s chance for a more efficient freight rail network will be lost if the Murray Basin Rail Project is not fully completed to its original plan.
The party’s candidate for Mildura in the upcoming state election, Jade Benham, and Nationals leader Peter Walsh on Monday issued a joint release claiming that the project, rescoped by the state government in 2020, would fail primary producers in its amended form.
“If Basin Rail is not completed, in full and to its original scope, it’ll limit our potential to open our region to domestic markets and new and emerging markets around the world,” Ms Benham said.
Announced in 2015, and funded by both the Victorian and federal governments, the project involves a complex series of infrastructure upgrades aimed at moving more freight from road to rail, and increasing freight efficiency between northern producers and the Port of Melbourne. Facing cost blowouts of hundreds of millions of dollars, it was scaled back by the state government two years ago.
Both Nationals MPs attacked the independent Member for Mildura, Ali Cupper, who Ms Benham will attempt to unseat at the next election, for saying in parliament last week that the project was “almost complete”.
Mr Walsh accused the former Labor candidate of “toeing the party’s line”, and Ms Benham said Ms Cupper was working to “let the Labor Government off the hook for abandoning our community”.
What Ms Cupper actually said, however, clearly referred to the revised project, not the original plan, when she said that “the rescoped project is now almost complete”.
She also said that “whether it should have been rescoped or whether the state government should have closed out the project are questions of legitimate debate” and she has previously described the rescoped model as a disappointing result and a “false promise” that had let Sunraysia down.
Ms Cupper has repeatedly said she wants to build on what work has been completed.
She said in the same parliamentary speech that “if we dwell on the wreckage of the Murray Basin rail project for too long, we risk missing new opportunities”.
“We need a new deal for freight, we need all stakeholders to design it and we need to retain our vision for full standardisation, and we must identify and incorporate other incremental steps along the way,” she said.
On Monday, Ms Cupper said the Nationals’ interpretation of what she had said was “so bewildering I don’t even know where to start”.
“What I have called for is a new deal for freight in north-west Victoria,” she said.
“Unlike the Nationals, I won’t be engaging in political sniping over the wreckage of this project, as it achieves nothing.
“Instead, we need to move forward and retain our vision to fully standardise the line, while also identifying and pursuing projects that can be done in the meantime.”
Mr Walsh said the Victorian government “has spent years crab-walking away from the Premier’s 2015 promise that Labor would continue these upgrades and complete the project in full”.
“Labor’s project mismanagement has sent the Basin Rail Project spiralling down a black hole of cost blowouts and delays, but instead of fixing the problems the Andrews Labor government’s rewriting history with a ‘rescoping’,” he said.
