ADJOURNMENT

Mr RICK WILSON (O'Connor) (19:50): Tonight I rise to inform the House of the importance of the Kalgoorlie Rail Realignment Project not just for the Goldfields region of my electorate but also for the rail corridor between Western Australia and the east coast. It is so important, in fact, that the former coalition government committed $2 million in 2021 for the Western Australian state Labor government to complete a business case.

The WA Labor government, however, does not seem to be interested in supporting the mining and resource sector across Western Australia, nor the community of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. It has taken over four years to assign the business case study to Deloitte and Arup through the Goldfields-Esperance Development Commission. This bold nation-building project has the potential to reshape freight movements across the Goldfields and Western Australia for generations to come.

Kalgoorlie-Boulder sits in the heart of the rail corridor via the Trans-Australian Railway, which runs from Adelaide across the Nullarbor Plain to Kalgoorlie and onwards to Perth and Fremantle. The Kalgoorlie rail realignment includes a plan for a major intermodal transport hub on the city's outskirts, functioning as an inland port for Western Australia. The realignment is crucial for further expansion of the Goldfields Super Pit and the region's booming rare earth and critical minerals industry, benefiting Western Australia and Australia as a whole.

Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the gold capital of Australia, and the development of the $800 million Lynas Rare Earths refinery transforms it into a strategic and economic defence asset. Supplying components from EVs to missiles, this project and associated industrial infrastructure will ensure the greater Goldfields remains an economic powerhouse into and beyond the 21st century.

Importantly, taxpayers have already funded the planning and investigation work. The Kalgoorlie rail realignment is also crucial to the community of Kalgoorlie-Boulder. Currently, rail runs directly through the heart of the city.

Any expansion of the Kalgoorlie regional health campus or nearby schools is severely restricted. By rerouting the freight line around town, it will also allow for valuable space for much-needed housing developments. And, if there were any further doubt, the collision between a double-stacked freight train and the Great Eastern Highway bridge near Kalgoorlie-Boulder could have had a tragic ending except for the quick thinking of a schoolteacher driving a bus full of schoolchildren.

The incident disrupted rail operations, closed a major road corridor and highlighted the risks associated with heavy interstate freight movements through a growing regional city. While I'm pleased to say that the business case has been finalised, it seems that now the WA state Labor government and the WA Minister for Transport and Major Infrastructure, Rita Saffioti, are intent to conceal the completed case from public eyes.

WA Minister Jarvis responded on behalf of WA minister for transport Rita Saffioti, advising the WA Legislative Council in September this year that the GEDC had submitted a strategic business case which was under review and: The next stage of planning includes the development of a detailed business case in due course. It seems that the opinion of the WA Labor government is that we need another business case to assess a business case that no-one is allowed to see.

The people of Kalgoorlie-Boulder deserve more than empty headlines and a series of hollow announcements. They deserve the opportunity to properly scrutinise and review the findings of a business case they have helped fund. The consultants have done the work, the Commonwealth says the business case is complete and I call on the WA government to make the business case publicly available to the people of the Goldfields.

I also want to update the House on O'Connor GrainGrowers' response to Safe Work Australia's recommendation for a major reduction for the fumigant phosphine, scheduled to take place nationally on 1 December this year. Phosphine is the principal fumigant used to control insect infestations in stored grain, particularly weevils. By reducing the national workplace exposure limit from the internationally accepted 0.3 particles per million to 0.05 particles per million, governments around Australia risk decimating Australia's $27 billion grain industry.

WorkSafe Victoria, to its eternal credit, has already proposed delaying the changes until December 2029, while the South Australian government has also announced there will be an 18-month extension for the new limits until July 2028. So I call on the Cook Labor government to back West Australian growers who feed Australia and the world, and allow industry to properly examine this hugely consequential upheaval to Australia's grain industry, delay the implementation and facilitate the 2026 harvest across my electorate of O'Connor.