Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Infrastructure Australia Bill 2008, which marks the delivery of another commitment of the Rudd government. This is the commitment to establish the Infrastructure Australia body, a central part of the government’s plan to combat inflation. It is an urgent task, and this government has wasted no time in getting on with it.

Well-planned infrastructure provides the basis for economic activity in our nation. I am talking about transport infrastructure and about energy and water infrastructure, which is needed to meet the challenge of climate change and to meet the reality of our mostly dry and mostly brown land. I am talking about communications infrastructure, which the government is meeting the need for with the national broadband network. I am talking about social infrastructure in the form of schools and hospitals. We need to recognise that because of the scale of our country, the sheer size of Australia, we are particularly dependent on efficient infrastructure utilisation.

Boosting productivity growth is vital to sustained economic prosperity. Infrastructure planning and development, which is what this legislation is concerned with, will facilitate increased productivity growth. Under the previous government Australia’s productivity growth has been allowed to dribble away to virtually nothing. We have gone from leading the industrialised nations of the world to trailing those industrialised nations. Reducing supply-side pressures in our economy by dealing with the lack of capacity will help bring down inflation and should apply downward pressure on interest rates. Infrastructure gaps are costing us 0.8 of a per cent of GDP in lost production every year.

Infrastructure is not simply about the economic dividends to communities and the nation. It is also about the lifestyle and the standard of living which we enjoy. It is about things like the ability of schools to educate our children and the ability of hospitals to care for the ill. There is also a point to be made that infrastructure markets are not like other markets. They are often monopolistic or semimonopolistic in nature, subject to regulatory control of pricing, and they are often publicly funded, bringing with that competing demands on government financing. Determining access and exclusive rights to infrastructure often creates uncertainty about the returns that will be generated and thus about the financing and construction. Given the importance of infrastructure development to Australia, we require national leadership to make up for what have been decades of underinvestment. Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, the industry body, has recognised this, the current government has recognised this, and you might well ask why the previous government did not recognise this.

In my electorate of Isaacs, both economic and social infrastructure will play important roles in the future economic wellbeing of local communities. There is a need for social infrastructure and a need, for local business in particular, for a highly skilled workforce, which is another key plank of Labor’s plan to fight inflation. There is a need in my electorate for physical infrastructure. The manufacturing sectors that operate in the two areas of Dandenong and Braeside need to be connected to fully functioning ports and airports and to other elements of their supply chain. With the skill shortage and heavy competition for skilled labour, there is also a need to ensure that skills are in fact being provided and skilled workers are becoming available. On the infrastructure of technology, it is no longer possible for businesses operating in a globalised economy to survive, let alone thrive, without being able to access broadband and other technologies which they need. So, too, for energy and water infrastructure: there is a need for businesses to have guaranteed supplies of energy and water with appropriate pricing.

This government is responding to infrastructure shortfalls by taking proactive steps, by establishing Infrastructure Australia and by appointing the first ever minister for infrastructure. The bill is going to create Infrastructure Australia, an advisory council, along with the Office of Infrastructure Coordination to support their work. It will have 12 members: five from the private sector including the chair, three from the federal government, three from state government and one from local government. I should congratulate Sir Rod Eddington on his announced appointment, Sir Rod having had a distinguished career including five years as the CEO of British Airways. Most importantly, this legislation will charge Infrastructure Australia with the role of auditing our current infrastructure needs and making recommendations to all levels of government and to the private sector. Its first task will be to complete an audit by the end of the year and to deliver to COAG a national infrastructure priority list by March 2009. This national coordination will help to overcome problems in infrastructure development and thus boost productivity and national competitiveness. It will apply downward pressure on inflation. With Infrastructure Australia there will be a coordinated national approach to assessing and fixing national infrastructure gaps and bottlenecks in our productive capacity.

Madam Deputy Speaker, the bill, as you have heard from other speakers, continues Labor’s tradition of nation building. It is well recognised that the Australian Labor Party has been the party that has genuinely believed in and has acted on the importance of the Commonwealth government and the use of its powers to build a unified nation. One can look at the examples of the Chifley government in relation to the Snowy Mountains scheme, the achievements of the Whitlam government in relation to urban and regional development and, more recently, the work of the Hawke and Keating governments on the standardisation of rail gauges or the Better Cities Program, which was focused on our urban infrastructure. By contrast, the Liberal Party has shifted from its longstanding support for what you could only call a parochial federalism to more recently—in its last 12 years of government, which we have just endured—the use of Commonwealth powers for partisan political gain. Neither philosophy represents a vision for the future of our nation.

The member for Shortland earlier commented on the report The great freight task delivered by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services. That is a report in which the committee, to its credit, identified a range of projects that are needed to allow our ports to function at capacity. I draw the attention of members to this to make the point that such a task should not have been left to a parliamentary committee to perform on an ad hoc basis; it is something that should have been dealt with in a coordinated way on a national basis. That report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Transport and Regional Services alone serves as a stark reminder of the failure of the former government in this area of infrastructure and nation building. This task of audit and of considering what projects are required will be a key role of Infrastructure Australia.

Australia is now ranked 20th out of 25 OECD countries for investment in public infrastructure as a percentage of GDP, and the reason why Australia occupies that lowly ranking among the developed countries of the world is that the former government was simply not interested in providing leadership or the investment that infrastructure required. The former government believed that planning for Australia’s economic future involved an ideological war against trade unions, rather than thinking about the actual needs of our country as we go forward into the 21st century.

The Auditor-General’s report, which we have heard quite a bit about in recent months—that is, the Auditor-General’s report on the Regional Partnerships program—showed that it was not merely neglect on the part of the former government in relation to infrastructure; there was a shameless, systematic rorting of infrastructure spending for short-term political gain. What we had were decisions about infrastructure that were based on the margin in particular seats rather than on national need. In future, decisions about infrastructure are going to be based on demonstrable need and not on pork-barrelling. The result of all this—

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