Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I would rather get on with the speech, thank you. I choose to paraphrase Jack Waterford, in the Canberra Times, who said the local government handouts ‘demonstrate the utter poverty of federal ministerial and bureaucratic ideas for coping with Australia’s infrastructure needs’. I agree. From the way the government has gone about promoting this much vaunted, much hyped and much spun nation-building legislation, it seems that the government is still well short of ideas when it comes to coping with Australia’s infrastructure needs.

The Labor government say they want to get on with the job of nation building. That is something we have heard ad nauseam from the Prime Minister and his colleagues. They have talked constantly about ending the blame game. The Treasurer even used the phrase ‘end the blame game’ twice when he spoke on the COAG Reform Fund Bill 2008 associated with this legislation. It is such a chronic and constant refrain from Labor that the public has been led to believe that Labor mean that, by ending the blame game, they will fix all the problems—that is, that they will solve the infrastructure issues of the whole of Australia. The Rudd government’s blame game refrain has misled the Australian people into believing that the government are going to fix something, that infrastructure is a problem which can be resolved once and for all. Of course it is not. We certainly know it is not. The government appear to believe otherwise.

Infrastructure spending is an ongoing requirement for all levels of government, across many different areas. I understand that about $450 billion worth of projects have been put forward for the Building Australia Fund, about $235 billion worth of which come from the state and territory governments. Simple maths tells us that $12.6 billion of the initial—and very likely final—capital that the Building Australia Fund is being furnished with will meet less than three per cent of these infrastructure requests.

No, the government cannot do it all—not even half, not even 10 per cent—with these funds. But they appear to believe their own publicity that they can. They have been sucked in by their own spin machine and are hopelessly lost in the vortex within. In their collective naivety they seem to think they can fix infrastructure in Australia for all time. Even worse, they have led the public to believe they can—just like they led the public to believe they were interested in standing up for all Australians only to continue to make decisions that favoured city or metropolitan voters over regional Australians. There was ample evidence of that in their canning of the Communications Fund.

Those opposite have also been talking about building the long-term productive capacity of our nation. I hear today the member for Blaxland chanting about how the cities are the powerhouse of the nation. I ask him to come out of the city and look at what is happening in electorates around Australia where exports are being created and money is truly being earned for the nation’s accounts. It is a significant sounding mantra which they all repeat as earnestly as their own favourite, ‘ending the blame game’. I point out that the Kalgoorlie electorate has already made a substantial contribution in the long-term productive capacity of our nation and it has the potential to contribute even more. There are a number of projects in the Kalgoorlie electorate which are very deserving of funding and which I have strongly believed for some time are genuine nation-building projects—and which, as such, deserve priority in the expenditure of any funds.

The House has heard me extol any number of times the virtues of the Ord River irrigation area and its long overdue and urgently needed expansion to stage 2. We know the Murray Darling Basin is struggling. Every new report about it brings more bad news. After a series of very dry years the basin has little water left. And yet my colleague Mr Hunt tells me that the Victorian government is being aided and abetted by the Prime Minister in seeking to take more water from this much stressed system for the north-south pipeline.

My electorate is separated from the Murray-Darling Basin by thousands of kilometres, but it can help. In the north-west of Australia, at the top end of my electorate, the Ord River irrigation area has enormous potential for expansion. There is a secure water supply and farmers in the Ord can grow just about anything. This area really has the potential to be the new food bowl for Australia and take much of the strain off the Murray-Darling area. It has the largest and most reliable water storage in Australia, with more than 20 times the volume of Sydney Harbour. It has the right climate and the right soils to expand into new areas very quickly. We could have crops in newly developed land there as soon as next year. Environmental approvals are in place and a native title agreement is in place. Everything is ready for expansion. The Liberal-National government in Western Australia has committed its immediate support to expanding the Ord. The Howard government promised to fund it before the last election. I accompanied my colleague the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Turnbull, on a visit to the Ord just two weeks ago. He was extremely enthusiastic about what has been done, what is being done, the potential for the future and most importantly the enthusiasm of those already living, working and producing in the Ord area.

I want to know what the Prime Minister and his government are going do about theOrd. Will they support it? Will they support the development of the area, of the Kununurra Airport and the port of Wyndham? Will they embrace the enormous potential this irrigation region has to expand, to contribute food, fibre and timber to domestic and export markets, to reduce the pressure on the Murray-Darling Basin and to build the long-term productive capacity of our nation?

Another opportunity to build Australia’s productive capacity comes through the development of more efficient transport and logistics. This is not only an opportunity for nation building; it is an opportunity for emissions reduction—something that it would seem those opposite are passionately concerned with, in theory at least. Emissions reduction is something the government seems determined to achieve even if it drives away the minerals and energy investments that helped build our economy and contributed to the very accumulation of funds that they are now planning to spend.

My home city of Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the service hub for around 60,000 people and the gold and nickel mines of the goldfields. However, we have a very inefficient situation in which the goldfields bound freight comes across from the east by rail and passes through on its way to Perth. The freight is subsequently unloaded in metropolitan Perth and then sent back to Kalgoorlie-Boulder, often by rail but mostly by road, having travelled an additional 1,200 kilometres past us and back again. It wastes time, money and resources and accumulates greenhouse emissions. A very sensible solution is to develop an intermodal transport hub right in Kalgoorlie-Boulder. This would reduce the unnecessary freight and heavy vehicle traffic through Perth and develop significant efficiencies. Under the Howard government I helped to obtain $3 million in funding to further develop this proposal. But a short-sighted—no, may I say a blind—state Labor government failed to see the benefits and chip in with their own funds.

Something that would add a great deal of value to an intermodal transport hub in Kalgoorlie would be the development of a sealed all-weather transport corridor between Kalgoorlie-Boulder, the goldfields and the town of Newman in the iron-rich Pilbara. Only about 300 kilometres of dirt road would need to be sealed to complete the link. It would have enormous benefits for the communities of both the Pilbara and Kalgoorlie-Boulder. It would mean Pilbara industries could use Kalgoorlie-Boulder as a supply and service base instead of Perth. An intermodal transport hub would improve freight efficiencies both between eastern Australia and the Pilbara and between eastern Australia and the south-east area as well as Perth itself. For the benefit of those opposite, that is real, and regional, nation building. Like the Ord, this is a project that requires support but does not require billions of dollars to realise great rewards and truly build Australia’s long-term productive capacity. If the Prime Minister and the minister for infrastructure and all those opposite are truly earnest about building Australia’s long-term productive capacity, and if they actually understand what that means beyond adding to the Labor fund of mantras, then they must see the merits of these projects. The government spin merchants have spun themselves into a deficit, but it is time they put some money where their mouth is and stood up for all Australians—not just those in the cities and those with state Labor governments but all Australians.

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