Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

This cannot be a slush fund, and we are going to move some amendments to the legislation. If the government does not accept those amendments it will be a further clear demonstration that this is a slush fund aimed at bailing out moribund state Labor governments and involving processes to artificially milk money into the system so that they can pretend that they are spending it. If Labor do not want this program to be labelled as a rort scheme, they should accept those amendments to bring some honesty and accountability into the program.

Victoria, of course, had good reason to be concerned about what was going to happen with the allocation of the funds. They asked for $10 billion, but it seems they will only get the crumbs from the table. The Victorian Premier had obviously read Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald, where the Prime Minister stated that, no matter how economically incompetent the New South Wales government is, it would be helped big time when money from these funds is doled out.

It is supposed to be independent, but the Prime Minister is telling New South Wales that they can get funding for some of their projects. That is hardly surprising, I suppose, because the Prime Minister is pretty dependent upon the New South Wales Right for the numbers for his leadership. Of course, the wife of his lieutenant, the minister for infrastructure, is the New South Wales Deputy Premier, so I hope that there is going to be appropriate arms-length distance between the decisions made about New South Wales.

It is worth looking at the New South Wales submission for money for the Building Australia Fund in some detail. We only have to rely on the media reports because, in reality, the state government has declined to reveal its full submission. We have heard that there is $41 billion planned from the three funds, although a lot of that is not available. As the surplus created by the former coalition government spirals downward into the whirlpool of Labor’s looming budget deficit, only $26.3 billion is left, with $12.6 billion for the Building Australia Fund. But New South Wales alone has asked for $40 billion. It is not going to go round. At the top of the list is $4 billion for an eight-kilometre rail line running through Labor seats in Sydney’s inner west. All the projects on the top rung of Labor’s priority list—$20 billion worth—are in Labor electorates. The regions in New South Wales miss out, as they always did. In Queensland the Bligh Labor government’s top 13 priority projects for Building Australia funding are all south of the Sunshine Coast.

It is obvious when you read the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald on 7 October that some projects are going to miss out. One is the $12 billion North West Metro rail line from the city to Rouse Hill, despite the fact that it has been promised on eight separate occasions by the state Labor government. However, the New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma and bureaucrats in February were told not to bother putting the North West Metro on the New South Wales wish list, because there were no votes for federal Labor in it. And we are being asked to believe that this fund is above political cycles and electoral boundaries!

The state and territory governments alone have put forward $235 billion worth of requests for funding from the Building Australia Fund and there is about $450 billion worth of projects altogether. Many of $450 million worth of projects are undoubtedly important and deserve funding. They have not been built in some cases because the private sector did not have the cash to build them or because other projects were given priority. You cannot do it all at once and the task will never be completed; we will always need more money for infrastructure. You do need to plan and build a national network—something which the previous government had done. We were involved in an extensive program of planning with the states to develop AusLink, and therefore for the first time we had a priority, a long-term planning arrangement for the road and rail systems of our country.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about the Communications Fund. This bill axes the Communications Fund. I spoke about it earlier today in the debate on the matter of public importance and I asked the minister a question during question time, which he refused to answer. I asked: what plans does the government have in mind to do the work that the Communications Fund was established to do? It was set up specifically to meet the future technology needs of people who live in regional areas. It was a fund in perpetuity. Two billion dollars was provided out of the proceeds of the sale of Telstra. It was there permanently to be able to provide funding to upgrade telecommunications infrastructure in the future. This money is being stolen to go into this group of Labor slush funds and there is no alternative in place.

I call on the minister in his summing up to tell us what plans Labor has for modernising telecommunications, not just this year and next year, not just a response to the Glasson review, but what are we going to do in 10 and 20 years time? Where is the funding available to guarantee to country people that they will not be left behind? Labor’s broadband scheme looks like falling in a heap and may deliver little or nothing to regional areas. What is going to be available for country people to catch up with the technology? You have stolen the money. You have stolen the money that was promised to regional areas. That money was committed in legislation which I understood Labor supported. Now you have taken that money away.

We will move amendments to preserve the Communications Fund. Those will be vital amendments for the future of regional Australia. I call on the government to accept those amendments in the spirit of developing legislation that is fair and decent. We must have a continuing Communications Fund to ensure that this vital infrastructure is provided in perpetuity for the people who would otherwise miss out as a result of these funds being commandeered for other uses. (Time expired)

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