Dear regional rail supporters,
The rail trail bill to amend the Transport Administration Act 1988 to give more powers to the minister and facilitate rail trails and roads on unused regional rail corridors passed both houses on the 9th and 10th August, 2022 with the support of Labor. Greeens opposed the bill and proposed amendments. Some were agreed but the most important from our point of view was not agreed i.e. the requirement to conduct a feasibility study for rail and trail before approving a rail trail.
Read Abigail Boyd,MLC speech here.
ABIGAIL SAID:
On behalf of The Greens, I oppose the Transport Administration Amendment (Rail Trails) Bill 2022. According to the Minister's second reading speech, the bill is intended to remove the need for authorisation from an Act of Parliament every time a new rail trail is proposed, allowing the Minister to instead determine by regulation when disused rail corridors may be used for rail trails. Importantly—and I will come back to this later—although the bill is marketed by the Minister and in its title as being about rail trails, it is much broader than that. It would allow, for instance, for a road to be built across a rail corridor for purposes completely unrelated to a rail trail.
Let us be clear. This bill would reduce the powers of this Parliament. It takes an issue that is highly divisive in some communities, particularly where they lack adequate public transport and are desperate for rail services to be restored, which otherwise would have had the benefit of scrutiny and debate in Parliament, and instead deals with it by regulation. When a regulation is made, it is only through the diligence of the community or of people in this place that it gets scrutinised, and only if a member of Parliament chooses to move a disallowance. It is not otherwise proactively brought to this Parliament's attention. Moving powers of Government Ministers from an Act of Parliament to subordinated legislation should never be done lightly or underestimated in terms of its weakening of the democratic process and of the Westminster system of lawmaking on which this Parliament is founded.
As the Legislation Review Committee noted in its report tabled today, by delegating the authorisation of the use of a disused railway line for other purposes, the bill decreases the level of parliamentary oversight applying to the creation of rail trails. I question the real agenda here. To the extent that a community endorses a rail trail proposal and there is broad support for that, you would expect the passage of a bill for that rail trail to be relatively straightforward and to not take much time. Although there is a lot of legislation that comes before this House that is subject to a protracted process, it is also the case that a lot of legislation comes through here that is not. That is because it is supported by the community, and that gets reflected in this Parliament.
You can watch lower house debae here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMCvzX4DNPk