Senate Select Committee on Productivity in Australia (part 2 of 2)
30 July 2026
Speaker dots
- Speakers in the chapter
- Colour: political group
- Grey: no group
Tap or click a chapter's dots to see names and groups.
Contents updated on 21 Oct 2026
Legend
Transcript markers
- text Sentence being played
- text Search result
- text Intervention cited by the link you opened
Click a sentence to play the video from that moment. Select text to quote it with the speaker, timestamp and link.
More options
Senate Select Committee on Productivity in Australia Australian Parliament
00:00 - 00:16
Speaker 13
Anyway, trying to barge stuff in from Darwin. I mean, what what do state and federal governments need to do to actually build actual resilience into these supply chains, not just talk about it?
00:16 - 01:33
Speaker 20
So I think the first bar on rail is where we run spurs alongside single track. That obviously creates an element of resilience. If if it is just single track over long distances, then we're always exposed to a, a point sensitive failure. And the amount of investment and maintenance ongoing needs to also be coordinated between industry. So we have outages, and we're far more planned and organized, particularly with Queensland Rail now.
We have outages that obviously then prioritize passenger traffic through the rail network. But at times, been in our peak trade periods where we then have to move significant amounts of freight onto roads because we can't stop a supply chain that deals in food. The Bruce Highway is one of the most dangerous parts of infrastructure for roads in the country. We understand that there are challenges in moving off rail into road for cost, but there's also safety aspects here too. And so I think the three things would be coordinated plans for maintenance, an increased level of maintenance, particularly across the East West, and then contingency with Spurs that can run-in parallel with the track itself so that we're not point sensitive on all those points.
01:33 - 01:43
Speaker 17
We have around one hundred days of outage a year from either East West or North South rail challenges. So it's it's not an insignificant amount.
The rest of the transcript is for Pro customers
Unlock the full transcript, chat, and every analysis feature with Polyfact Pro.
The video itself stays free to watch, in full, no account needed.
Start a free trial