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

I am pleased to have the opportunity to talk on this matter of public importance today, the consequences of Labor’s failure to invest in productive economic infrastructure. The consequences are these: higher debt, high deficits, higher interest rates, fewer jobs, unaffordable housing, congested cities, isolated communities and lower standards of living.

The population growth projections that have been put forward by the Treasury bring challenges and opportunities. A growing population provides the demand we need to grow, but failure to manage and support this growth creates major problems for our cities, our regions, our towns and throughout rural and remote Australia. We can loiter at the edges of this problem, and we can talk about issues of managing demand, but our principal response must be to address supply. We have seen the problems in the housing industry, because this government and state governments around the country have failed to issue instructions and conduct policies that deal with the supply of land and the supply of housing, and so we are seeing housing becoming uncontrollably unaffordable in this country—through a failure to act.

The government has raised expectations on this matter, and the minister just alluded to that. In the BCA report it actually says that the government has raised expectations on these matters. But these expectations, I am sad to say for the government, remain unfulfilled. They remain unaddressed, despite the government’s attempts at spin to the contrary.

From listening to this debate, under the government’s mantra, there is the time before 23 November 2007 BK—before Kevin—when the earth was a great expanse of darkness! It was a formless void in the BK period, if you listen to those who sit on the other side of this place. According to the government’s version, on 23 November 2007, they emerged from that darkness and pronounced, ‘Let there be pink batts and let there be school halls,’ under this government’s false understanding that this constituted investments in economic infrastructure in Australia’s long-term interests and in the long-term interests of our economy.

The truth is something quite different. The truth is that, under the coalition, infrastructure investment rose from three per cent of GDP to 5.6 per cent of GDP. Each year, that is an increase from $15 billion a year to $56 billion a year. We undertook that task in recognition of the increasingly central role that the private sector plays, and must, in delivering on the nation’s infrastructure challenge—an infrastructure challenge that is estimated at somewhere between $450 billion and in excess of $700 billion. We are not going to meet that challenge if we think that the government sector is going to do it all on its own, which is the illusion this government is working under. Under the coalition, not only did we have a significant increase in the amount—almost a doubling—that is spent as a percentage of GDP on infrastructure but we also had an increase from one-third to two-thirds of the component that was invested by the private sector.

The government might want to put itself at the centre of the economy but, if we are going address this nation’s long term infrastructure challenges, that is not the answer. We need to put the private sector at the centre of our economy and ensure that we can deliver on the challenges ahead. While the investment infrastructure was increasing, the government that John Howard led was paying back Labor debt—a point that this government seems to forget on every occasion. It was not just $96 billion worth of debt that was paid back; it was also the $56 billion of interest that had to be paid on that debt in order to retire it. What of the government’s action? As we read in the Business Council of Australia report yesterday, only 14 per cent—

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