Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I advise the member opposite—he lives in Brisbane—to go and have a look at the literally hundreds of workers today doing work on the Ipswich Motorway. You should go and have a look at Labor’s nation-building agenda in practice on the Ipswich Motorway—something that was ignored by those opposite for 12 years. Such progress is, of course, part of Labor’s tradition as a nation-building party. That is why from day one we moved quickly to establish Infrastructure Australia to bring together all the different levels of government and the private sector.

If Infrastructure Australia provides the way, the Building Australia Fund provides the means—a means to fund investment in roads, in rail, in ports and in broadband. These funds are under threat from a reckless, irresponsible opposition that wants to blow, at a minimum, a $6.2 billion hole in the surplus—an opposition that discarded its leader today but discarded economic responsibility sometime ago. It completely gave up on economic responsibility. I would have thought that the new Leader of the Opposition would understand the importance of our nation-building agenda, because in the past he has had a history of being attracted towards the Labor agenda. It is common knowledge in the Labor Party that the new Leader of the Opposition went to Kirribilli to meet with then Prime Minister Keating about getting the casual vacancy in the Senate for the Labor Party in 1994.

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