Bass Straight freight service could provide massive trade boost

Frank Castles, the former Colac Otway shire City Deals project director talks with Andrew Miller, about the King Island-Apollo Bay shipping trial.

Transcript

00:00There are objections, and I think a lot of the objections are not really well founded,

00:05and I think that's based on information which is misleading in terms of the volume

00:11of the transport or the freight that we'd be putting through here.

00:14Oh, it certainly opens up the economy of King Island, and it opens up

00:18and starts to use the asset here at Apollo Bay, and benefits to Apollo Bay,

00:23and, well, it's up to the community to realise the opportunity of joining the two economies.

00:28Well, that's what we really want to do, a trial, is to prove to the people

00:32in South West Victoria, to Grayhatch Road, sorry, in the community of Apollo Bay,

00:38how unobtrusive this exercise will be, that this service used to operate here in the past for many

00:45years, and then a person comes in, goes out, and is really unobtrusive to the current experience

00:52for the locals and the tourists. We just want to demonstrate that. We want to demonstrate

00:57how little impact it will be in terms of noise, smell, pollution, animal waste.

01:03These are all the concerns that people are quite legitimately asking about,

01:07but we can demonstrate that these are minimal and can be really well managed.