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

The Prime Minister and the Treasurer have demonstrated their utter contempt and their disregard for regional, rural and remote Australians.

Another significant concern with this legislation is transparency—something that the Rudd-Swan government talks a lot about but is not prepared to demonstrate. I am very concerned that these billions of dollars will be used as a Labor slush fund to prop up marginal seats and inept Labor governments, which is why we have flagged an amendment to insert transparency clauses requiring the public disclosure of all documentation relating to proposed projects. That means all evaluation criteria, all business cases, all cost-benefit analyses and so on. I also believe all projects should be analysed by the Productivity Commission before any money is spent and that those commissioned reports should be made public.

Determinations by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation and the Treasurer that credit money into the relevant accounts must be disallowable instruments. We must ensure that money can only be spent on projects that satisfy competitive neutrality guidelines. That is to say, the public sector should not undercut the private sector in service provision. We will also seek to ensure that both advisory and Future Fund board reports are made public. We believe project-funding decisions must make certain of financial commitments from asset owners and stakeholders to meet costs for the whole life of the asset. This is particularly important. Ongoing costs can be several times the initial capital expenditure. Finally, we must prohibit federal Labor from mimicking its New South Wales state colleagues in getting the payment of fees upfront on projects—a practice which can and would compromise many projects.

I have already said that this infrastructure funding falls far short of the amount that is needed to begin to address current infrastructure requirements. Once again, the Rudd-Swan government fails to understand and appropriately address the needs of its constituents, just as it did a couple of weeks ago when it grandly announced $300 million in local government infrastructure funding. Western Australia was promised nearly $29 million in these one-off grants. This figure falls far short of the amount needed. The Western Australian Local Government Association says there is an infrastructure backlog requiring more than $2 billion of spending, not $29 million. The Local Government Association speaks for shire councils, including those in my electorate, where one CEO told me that the grant they had been promised by Mr Rudd and Mr Albanese—that is, the Prime Minister and the minister responsible for infrastructure—is only about 10 per cent of what they need. Cheers to that mob!

The guidelines on what the infrastructure funding can be used for are far too restrictive. So the Prime Minister and the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government can pat themselves on the back and congratulate each other on how generous they have been. I choose to paraphrase—

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