A Shorten Labor Government will extend the Bruce Highway from the intersection of Comport Street and Draper Street to Cairns Airport, and invest up to $40 million to upgrade key intersections along this section of road.
These major upgrades will create local jobs while improving access to the Airport and taking trucks off suburban streets and away from the City Centre.
The Bruce Highway is Queensland’s most-important piece of road infrastructure and is central to the movement of freight and people up and down its coast.
The funding will provide much needed upgrades of key intersections along the route, ensuring that large trucks, including B-doubles carrying aviation fuel, don’t need to mix with local traffic and high pedestrian activity areas in the Cairns CBD.
Cairns is also the gateway to the Great Barrier Reef. The extension will ease the pressure placed on local roads and infrastructure that the almost three million international and domestic tourists bring to the city and surrounding region each year.
The project will be undertaken in partnership with the Queensland State Government and is part of Labor’s Plan for Real Jobs in Regional Queensland.
This project builds on the $5 million Labor has already announced for the Wangetti Tourist Trail in Cairns. Labor understands the importance of tourism in the region, and it’s why we will invest in upgrading local roads and infrastructure. This will not only create local jobs and grow the local economy, it will also make it as easy as possible for tourists to enjoy all Cairns has to offer.
Bill Shorten and Labor understand regional Queensland, regularly holding town hall in order to understand the issues that matter its residents at a grassroots level. Labor backed the Cairns community with funding for the tourist trail and we are backing the Cairns region with investment in infrastructure.
Labor can fund these job-creating projects because unlike Turnbull and the Conservatives, we aren’t giving new tax handouts to multinationals and millionaires.
TUESDAY, 17 APRIL 2018
