Federal cities minister Angus Taylor has given hope to residents north of Mandurah who have been campaigning to build the long-awaited Lakelands train station, urging them to apply for funding from a billion dollar facility set up in this year’s budget.
Mr Taylor, who visited Lakelands with Canning MP Andrew Hastie on Monday, identified the National Housing Infrastructure Facility as a possible source of funding for the station.
But he warned the federal government were looking to support projects with strong community backing.
“The worst thing that can happen is when houses are built without the supporting infrastructure,” Mr Taylor said.
“I’ve seen too much of it around Australia and I firmly believe it’s the job of government to make sure that infrastructure goes in ahead of or in parallel with a housing development.
“Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case here and that’s why we’ve put together the billion dollar National Housing Infrastructure Facility in the last budget.”
The facility was established to finance infrastructure needed to drive the supply of new housing such as transport links, and power and water infrastructure.
Mr Taylor said train stations like the one proposed for Lakelands would be a high priority.
“A good project is one that does support housing development and we’re particularly interested in trains stations,” he said.
“We think that’s one of the really big opportunities, to increase housing around train stations and to build train stations to support that.”
Mr Hastie said he would be calling on the state government to get behind the project.
“At the moment, the missing player is the state government,” he said.
“We’ve had local government representation at the meeting with the developers, we had the federal minister, we had me.
“Next week we’ll have Paul Fletcher, minister for urban infrastructure, who oversees the $10 billion rail infrastructure fund, which has identified the Mandurah line as one of its strategic priorities.
“There’s a good case to be made for getting funding from a number of different funding streams.”
Mr Taylor said the project would need significant community support and he was pleased Mr Hastie and Mayor Marina Vergone were backing the project.
“Andrew is clearly a passionate champion for this project and we take notice of that,” he said.
“He’s fighting for his community and that’s exactly what he should be doing and the project is now on the radar.
“We’ve committed the billion dollar facility: that’s not theoretical, we’ve committed it.”
Mr Taylor said the station would have to compete for funding from the National Housing Infrastructure Facility and the projects that would succeed would be those “where the work is happening now”.
“That’s why I strongly encourage the local community to get behind Andrew and put forward a great application,” he said.
Mr Hastie asked residents keen to see the station built to sign a petition on his website.