Article: Ten-year plan for big Hastings port

[ozbob]

From the Melbourne Age click here!

Ten-year plan for big Hastings port

Ten-year plan for big Hastings port
Clay Lucas
January 8, 2011

THE Baillieu government will use a national ports strategy to help push through plans to develop Hastings as a big container port within a decade.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard yesterday released the National Ports Strategy in Perth, promising it would result in better long-term planning on the waterfront in Australia.

The strategy is designed in part to reduce bottlenecks at big Australian ports.

At ports such as Newcastle, in New South Wales and the Dalrymple Bay coal terminal, in Queensland, ships often queue for long periods before docking.

The strategy will require the nation's port authorities to have ''buffer'' strategies to prevent residential encroachment on main transport corridors near ports. It also proposes nationally consistent environmental management to streamline approval processes and reduce delays at ports.

The $1 billion dredging of Port Phillip Bay's shipping channels in 2008 took more than a decade from the time it was proposed, largely because of the long environmental approval process.

Victoria's Ports Minister Denis Napthine yesterday welcomed the port strategy, written by the National Transport Commission and Infrastructure Australia. The strategy will be considered this year by the Council of Australian Governments.

The Port of Melbourne, Australia's busiest port, expects a quadrupling of container traffic by 2035.

Dr Napthine said the extra containers would see inner Melbourne's roads grind to a halt if Victoria did not quickly establish an alternative port at Hastings. ''The previous government ... said there was not going to be any container trade [in Hastings] until 2035. We think that is ludicrous and a recipe for congestion,'' Dr Napthine said.

About 200 ships a year now visit the Port of Hastings, importing and exporting oil, LPG and steel.

No containers are shipped from the deep-water port.

The cost of redeveloping Hastings could run into billions of dollars when the expense of building new transport links is added.

The Victorian government wants Canberra to help fund the vast cost of a new rail line and roads to Hastings.

Rail would link the port to Lyndhurst and Dandenong, where freight would be moved on to trucks. This, Dr Napthine said, would ''minimise the port's encroachment on environmentally sensitive areas''.

Dr Napthine said the state government also expected Canberra to streamline the environmental approval process for building ports, without reducing protection of marine areas. ''The channel-deepening project required a whole raft of environmental processes to satisfy the process in Victoria, and then a whole repetition of that to satisfy the federal government,'' he said.

The process had led to a better environmental result, he said, but had taken far longer than needed.

Committee for Melbourne chief executive Andrew MacLeod backed the state's push to develop Hastings. ''Eventually, more port [activity] needs to go down to Hastings,'' he said, and Fishermans Bend, in Port Melbourne, ultimately had to become residential, which would require much of the shipping to be moved.

Port of Melbourne spokesman Peter Harry said that while the new federal strategy called for long-term plans by waterfront authorities, Melbourne already had a 30-year plan.

Federal opposition transport spokesman Warren Truss said Labor's federal ports strategy was meaningless.

''Labor will do nothing on the waterfront which could upset its masters in the unions,'' Mr Truss said. ''A new ports strategy will only make a difference if it is accompanied by new funding for port infrastructure and a commitment to renewed waterfront reform.''

[bayside]

It will be interest to watch the rail development in this project given Victoria's poor history in this area.  If there is a rail connection will it be 5" 3" or  4' 81/12.  Will it be via Dandenong as a new line or off the Stony Point line or something different.  Or is it case of more B doubles.

Getting a rail connect from Hastings to the major terminals in Melbourne then onto the national network will be a big tasks.