Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and COAG and Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader on Emissions Trading Design) Share this | Hansard source

The infrastructure spending in the budget should have been the government’s first stimulus package not the third, and for obvious reasons. When there is a financial crisis claimed to be the worst in 80 years, the way in which we spend every dollar is critical. We must get the most out of every dollar spent. We on this side of the House listened for 12 months or more before the last election to those opposite telling us they had a plan for infrastructure. We heard it ad nauseam. We heard that they had a deeply considered plan for infrastructure. Yet it took 18 months in government and seven months of the financial crisis before there was one decision. That decision took 2½ years and we were seven months into the financial crisis before we heard that they had a detailed, considered plan ready to put to the Australian people. They had already spent tens of billions of dollars on handouts before we saw one decision, and that was in this budget. Then, when we finally saw a decision, most of those projects had been under active consideration by the former government.

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