Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

On election night the Prime Minister said he was elected to govern for all Australians, but it has taken less than his first 100 days for us to realise that that was never an honest promise and it has not been delivered on. We heard a lot from Labor during the election campaign about working families, about interest rates, about infrastructure, about skills, about compassion. Voters certainly did not expect to see all those election promises broken in the first 100 days. Slowly but surely Labor’s attack on those who did not vote for it is being revealed. The Rudd government may be in the midst of a media honeymoon, but as I have travelled around local communities, particularly over recent weeks, I have seen that the anger is growing. They are learning that there is a world of difference between Labor’s rhetoric during the election campaign and Labor’s action in government.

The Labor Party went on and on about the previous government’s supposed failures on infrastructure, in spite of all the progress that had been made on AusLink—the enormous boost in road funding, the commitments to rail that had been absent for such a long period of time—and in spite of the fact that we had programs like Roads to Recovery, which made real improvements at the local level. Given the rhetoric, voters did not expect to see road and rail funding being savagely cut by this government.

The government talks about the need for infrastructure and yet, at the first available opportunity, it slashes funding for roads. On the figures released earlier in the week by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, Labor may be spending as little as $15 billion on roads and rail between 2009 and 2013. That is less than half what the coalition promised in the last election campaign. We committed to a $31 billion investment in road and rail around Australia, and the party that says it believes in infrastructure has so far committed to only $15 billion.

We have heard of many projects that have been stripped from the list. The people of the Hunter Valley want an answer from the Minister for Defence about why he supported the F3 to Branxton project before the election but suddenly he has forgotten about it since that time. We want to hear from the people who promised that they would be upgrading the Pacific Highway. What has happened to the money for the Pacific Highway? We want to know what is happening to the major highways across the country, where spending is in doubt because this government has failed to guarantee that the money will be provided. Voters did not expect AusLink to be pared back so dramatically. Voters in regional Australia did not expect the inland rail link to be kicked into touch. Voters in regional Australia did not expect that existing transport projects would be delayed for a year or maybe even more because of the new bureaucracy called Infrastructure Australia.

Labor has also made it clear that it intends to move expenditure on infrastructure from regional areas to the cities. The minister for infrastructure has made it quite clear that not enough money is being spent on roads in the cities and too much is being spent in the country, and he intends to relocate those projects to capital cities, particularly Sydney. The Prime Minister himself said, as Leader of the Opposition in February last year, that he would be moving funding away from regional communities, away from states like Tasmania, and spending it in Sydney. This is the Prime Minister who promised to govern for all Australians. Well, if you live in Sydney he will be governing for you, but if you happen to live in a regional area or in an outer state then your interests are likely to be forgotten. He has also axed the $200 million Growing Regions program, a program that was designed to put in place some of the infrastructure that people who live in the fastest growing areas of Australia desperately need—areas on the North Coast of New South Wales, the Sunshine Coast in Queensland and the south-west of Western Australia. These are areas that have grown very, very quickly. They need a bit of extra help. This is the kind of regional development program that was warmly welcomed by the mayors of Australia, and yet this government has axed it.

This is a government that has a plan to beat inflation, we are told—a five-point plan. One of the points of that plan is to build more infrastructure, to get rid of infrastructure bottlenecks. But what has the government done? It has cut funding for roads, it has axed the Growing Regions program and it has initiated no new expenditure on infrastructure anywhere in the country. It will be at least a decade before any Labor programs make any impact at all on inflation. The government is using words but not delivering actions.

That is not the only area where Labor’s words have been different from its actions. Labor constantly repeats that it is dedicated to working families; we hear it so often. And yet the government expresses a deep, continuing lack of interest in the day-to-day costs of working families. The price of petrol has gone up. The price of groceries has gone up. This is the government that said that it would be putting downward pressure on grocery prices and on petrol prices. The promise has proved to be empty: grocery prices go up; fuel prices go up.

One of the very first acts of this government was to actually raise taxes on fuel and on the trucking industry, with new registration fees—up to a 100 per cent increase on the registration costs of the biggest trucks, the trucks that move the food around the country—and a new fuel excise, a new 1.3c a litre penalty, on everything that moves around the country. And this is a government that claims to be compassionate about people and worried about the food basket. And yet it has made a decision which the minister admits will add $17 a year to the food basket of an average Australian family. How is this putting downward pressure on prices? In fact, it is a deliberate act of the government to put up prices to guarantee that struggling families pay more. The rhetoric has been so empty.

That is why we, in the Senate, have acted to block this legislation and we will be moving to disallow the regulation of fuel excise indexation. But I warn Australians that, after 1 July, there will be a different Senate, and it may well pass these tax increases. It may well pass these impositions on the Australian people. It may well deliver the higher grocery prices which we will be able to hold back at least until 1 July.

Let us move on to other areas where the government said it would be compassionate. One of its very first acts affected the people who perhaps need assistance most, the carers of Australia. They were stunned to find that their regular annual bonus was not going to be paid by this government. It was going to take $600 away from carers allowance recipients and carers payment recipients. How is that a government of compassion?

This matter of public importance is particularly about the impact on regional communities. You may not be aware, Madam Deputy Speaker—and certainly members opposite who do not care about regional Australia would not be aware—that there are many more recipients of carers benefits in the regional areas than there are in the cities. For instance, in my own electorate of Wide Bay there were 5,000 people who received carers benefits in 2004. By comparison, in the city electorate of the member for Watson, who is sitting across the table from me, there were only 2½ thousand people receiving carers benefits. You will find that kind of pattern repeated regularly.

The people receiving carer benefits are very strongly represented in regional areas, and that is partly because there is not the level of health services and aged care services in regional areas that there is in the cities. You cannot just call a taxi and have somebody take you to the doctor when you need to go. In fact, there probably is not even a doctor if you live in a regional area. So Labor strips away the kind of benefit that is necessary to help these people in their difficult times.

See this speech in context