Traveston travesty
LOCAL coalition MP Warren Truss stood at Federal overlooking a site where a section of hill the equivalent of a Glasshouse Mountain had been removed, and spoke of the cost to taxpayers of being left high and dry by the defunct Traveston Crossing dam.
"It's been built high up in the hills so that it can be above the water level of a dam that now is not going to be built," the Nationals leader and member for Wide Bay told a media gathering last week.
"Clearly it's cost more than it ought to.
"It will be a fine piece of road for drivers to drive on, but it would have been so much better had it been the route chosen for this particular section, the one identified by the community and therefore the best from a traffic perspective."
The shadow transport minister was just getting revved up for the start of his now completed Fix the Bruce five-day drive from Brisbane to Cairns undertaken with fellow coalition MPs whose electorates are impacted by ongoing flooding and poor road standards.
"We recognise that this is a vital piece of national infrastructure - a road project where substantial investment needs to be made to bring it up to a standard that Queenslanders have a right to expect," Mr Truss said.
"The reality is that this road connects at least 11 Queensland cities, around 700,000 people."
But Mr Truss said he believed one of the most vital missing funding links along the entire stretch of road was the Cooroy to Curra section A, meant to link up to the Federal section from Cooroy.
"That's why it is such a priority to build section A of the Cooroy-to-Curra section. That particular road has been identified by the Queensland Government and the RACQ as the highest priority on the Bruce Hwy," Mr Truss said.
"When you have a situation where four lanes break down to two and then build up to four that's obviously hazardous.
"I think it's vitally important that we start as soon as possible on section A.
"The current government has no money for any new project between Cooroy to Curra right through the (planning) forward estimates.
"We want to start on this section of the road just as quickly as we get into government. As soon as the plans are ready we'll call tenders and you'll see construction underway."
Mr Truss said on top of the $1 billion that new LNP premier Campbell Newman had earmarked for a state-wide Bruce Hwy upgrade, a further $4 billion in federal funding was required straight up.
"So that's five billion more to be spent on the Bruce Hwy," he said.
"Even that is probably not going to be enough, but it will help to make a substantial difference and an improvement to the quality of this road.
"This (road trip) will help us develop a priority list and decide the level of funding that's going to be required."
