Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

This is a motion of self-congratulation that we are used to receiving from this government. I am surprised that the member for Oxley has decided not to hang around for the accolades that he suspected would come but he probably just presumed they would come—as is so much the case with this government with motions of self-congratulation. But the truth about this matter, despite the arguments put forward by the government, is that Australia’s infrastructure challenge is massive: it is estimated at somewhere between $455 billion and $700 billion. This government seems to pretend to the Australian people that they can meet that all on their own. It is absolute arrant nonsense. They also claim to pretend that they invented the notion of infrastructure, that they invented the notion of bricks and mortar and that they invented the notion of engineering construction on 23 November 2007, which is also untrue. Prior to the last election the coalition pledged $31 billion on land transport infrastructure initiatives between 2007-08 and 2013-14. Labor is spending in response to that $26 billion. So they are still $5 billion short on what the Australian people would have got from the coalition government had they been re-elected.

If we go and look at AusLink back to 2004, the coalition government would have spent $45 billion to improve our land transport infrastructure. In 1996 infrastructure investment in Australia accounted for only three per cent of GDP. That is what we inherited as a government and we left it at 5.6 per cent of GDP. That is from $15 billion to over $56 billion—so much for Labor’s rewriting of history in relation to infrastructure investment in this country. A considerable component of achieving this objective, and I think this is why Labor fail to acknowledge it, was through harnessing private sector investment both in capital and in delivery of projects. Private sector investment in infrastructure increased under the term of the coalition government from 36 per cent of the total to over two-thirds. There is a good reason why encouraging private investment in infrastructure is a good idea, and that is because the surveys show time and time again that private sector delivered projects deliver on time and on budget more frequently. In fact, a survey by Allen Consulting concluded that under the model of traditionally procured projects through the government sector—and remember this is the government that says the government should be at the centre of the economy, not the private sector—23.5 per cent of the time they were behind time on delivery of their projects compared with privately procured and developed projects on average being 3.5 per cent ahead of time.

So the idea of encouraging the private sector to invest in infrastructure under the coalition government proved to be a success. It harnessed massive investment of capital in Australia’s infrastructure task, which still remains great. The coalition does not pretend it is somehow solved as the government pretends it is solved. There is a massive task that is still to be completed at the hands of governments of all persuasions in the future. The other point I would make is that, to achieve this, we not only harnessed private sector investment in this massive task but we also managed to pay off $96 billion of Labor debt in the process—an extraordinary achievement. On the day that the former member for Higgins has departed this place, it is important to acknowledge his achievement in delivering this outcome. Of the $22 billion in infrastructure that is boasted about in this budget, only $1.7 billion is to be spent this year and only $8.5 billion of this $22 billion total is actually going to be on roads, rail and ports. The government are leading people to believe that they are out there building roads, rail and ports—well, they are not. They are building many other things but not too much of roads, rail and ports.

The infrastructure challenge remains significant. Tonight I want to draw quickly on one part of that challenge, and that is the freight challenge that we face as a nation. Infrastructure Partnerships Australia has produced an outstanding report called Meeting the 2050 freight challenge. I table the report. The report shows that the freight task, from current levels, will double by 2020 and triple by 2050. The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics estimates a cost of $20 billion a year to our economy by 2020 if we do nothing, which is what this government is doing. Every one per cent increase in efficiency in this area will save $1.5 billion.

The solutions to this are not just about bricks and mortar. The government likes to think only about bricks and mortar when it comes to these matters, but it is about planning, approvals, regulatory reform, partnering, pricing and competitive neutrality between modes. These are the reforms that would be part of a real infrastructure reform agenda—not parading around the country in hard hats and luminous vests pretending to solve a problem which will take many years to solve. (Time expired)

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