Ivan Dean, Speeches Index

Tuesday 24 May 2011

ST MARYS PASS CLOSURE

Mr DEAN ( Windermere ) - Madam President, I rise too to give support to the motion put forward by the member. Once again, she has put a lot of work into this and over a fairly short period of time and no doubt the constituents in that area would want this to happen. It is very good that you have done that and for the member to be in support of the people who very much rely on this infrastructure.

The thing is with the Elephant Pass Road - and I have travelled the road a lot though probably not as much now as I used to; I used to travel it very frequently at one stage - that the Elephant Pass side of it is quite a dangerous piece of road as well. Now putting the traffic all through that area creates a greater danger to road users. I think that is a matter that should always be considered and taken into account when looking at this sort of infrastructure as well.

The St Marys Pass is an interesting piece of road because you do not really need a great lot of rain for it to cause problems in the area. I do not know whether it is the fires or it is the terrain which is just not stable that creates these significant changes. I was thinking, it would only be about 20 to 25 years ago that the Falmouth Road was put through. That had been, up until then, a bit of a goat track, a gravel piece of road, so it was fortuitous that that went in to open it up to at least give them reasonable access back up through the Elephant Pass Road to St Marys. So I support the member here, Madam President.

I guess the position of the State currently and the economic problems confronted by it are such that we might see things like this being glossed over for a period of time, but it is a critical piece of infrastructure and it does need to be sorted out and sorted out fairly quickly. If you look at the infrastructure for instance - and I am not against this I might add, I support it totally - of the East Tamar Highway and the bypass at Dilston, there is a seven-kilometre piece of road there at a cost of about $60 million for a road that really - they already had a serviceable road; they already had a road that operated at all times - so I think that they need to get this right. I am not saying it was not needed; it was needed because it was a dangerous piece of road - I think there were about 17 road deaths that I can recall as a police officer on the piece of road at Dilston that has been bypassed. So it would be interesting to look at the number of incidents, accidents and crashes that have occurred on the piece of road that we are talking about right now. It needs to be done and I think it is a priority; in fact DIER ought to be looking at it very closely and I think they are. I think they have indicated that they are looking at another route; I think they have said that, I read it in the paper somewhere -

Ms Rattray - Nothing firm.

Mr DEAN - Nothing firm but they were going to consider it at least. I certainly support the motion, Madam President.

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