The decision by the Albanese Labor Government to abandon the Queensland leg of the Inland Rail project is a devastating but not surprising blow to regional Queensland.

Mr Littleproud said it was a failure that has its roots in a fundamentally flawed corridor decision made over a decade ago that has given the Albanese government the excuse to cut and run.

When then-Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce selected the Queensland corridor, it was routed through flood-prone land that was always going to require hundreds of millions of dollars in additional engineering. That decision condemned the project to ten years of revised Environmental Impact Statements, planning setbacks, and ultimately a cost blowout to $45 billion — more than three times the original budget. Every dollar wasted on re-routing, re-engineering, and re-approvals over the past decade can be traced back to that original error.

“Routing major freight infrastructure through a floodplain was never nation-building — it was nation-wasting. The corridor was wrong from the start, and regional Queensland has paid the price for a decade”, Mr Littleproud said.

The Albanese Government must also be held to account. Four years of inaction during a period of high inflation drove costs even higher, and Labor has now compounded the insult by committing billions to a Sydney-Newcastle high-speed rail while walking away from the freight corridor that would have transformed Queensland’s regional economy.

Mr Littleproud said that the Coalition should continue to commit to inland rail but look into an alternative Queensland rail corridor — one that avoids floodplain terrain, minimises engineering risk, and delivers the best economic outcome for Queensland’s agricultural, mining, and export industries.

“We owe Queensland a clean sheet. Investigate a new corridor, choose the right one, and build freight rail that serves this state for the next hundred years. Regional Queensland has waited long enough — we cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the past”.