Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

You will most certainly be invited. I look forward to your contribution and I know that you are going to hear that people certainly feel that there is a different level of engagement and they are looking forward to identifying the Commonwealth programs that will help them with both the economic and the social prosperity in their regions.

To go to the specific content of this matter of public importance, I do think it takes a bit of front to suggest that this government has not been supportive of families, of small business operators and indeed of pensioners. We have, importantly, kept the economy strong and supported Australian jobs, small businesses and working families through the global recession. As a result we have national unemployment at 5.5 per cent. This is an astonishing achievement. I see the member for Berowra in the chamber today. He would know that in our area of northern Sydney the figure is even lower than that—about four per cent, 4.2 per cent. It has everything to do with our management of the economy over the past year and everything to do with the money that went into the stimulus, and that has kept Australians working.

I am very glad that the Leader of the Nationals has seen fit to put this forward. When I think of failure to deliver for families, for small business people and for pensioners, my thoughts also go to a matter that would concern him a great deal, particularly in relation to small business people and pensioners travelling on the section of the Bruce Highway between Cooroy and Curra in his own electorate of Wide Bay. We know well the words of the Leader of the Nationals when it comes to this particular stretch of the road. The Leader of the Nationals has been quoted several times as saying he travels the highway regularly, with his heart in his mouth. He says:

I’m always pleased when I turn off … you never feel completely safe on that road.

He has also called it a ‘dreadfully accident-prone section, rated the worst piece of the highway in Australia’. Yet, for all his expressed concern, what did the member for Wide Bay deliver for his electorate during his 12 years in office? By the way, this was during the boom years, the years of plenty. The member for Wide Bay spent 10 years as a minister and 14 months as transport minister, and I am very pleased to say that the Rudd Labor government is a very different government to the one that the member for Wide Bay was part of.

Work started on the Cooroy to Curra section of the Bruce Highway in September last year. We were committed to getting works underway quickly and to provide certainty for those families and the small business operators and pensioners that you have talked about. The upgrade will not only improve safety on this stretch of road; it will create—this is what the opposition does not want to listen to—some 650 direct jobs and a further 1,000 indirect jobs. It is a great boost to Queensland’s regional economy.

We chose the eastern alignment option because it was outside the footprint of the proposed Traveston dam, its total cost was estimated at $613 million and work could commence in September last year. That is part of a record $2.6 billion investment to improve the Bruce Highway. Yet, as is apparent, the member for Wide Bay has little regard for families, for small business people and for pensioners. He has such little regard that after the May budget he tried to run a bit of a scare campaign, telling his electorate:

The money announced by the government … is to construct a section of the Bruce Highway between Cooroy and Curra which is to be flooded by the Traveston Crossing Dam.

This is not true. The eastern alignment had been agreed but he was still scaremongering. Late last year the member for Wide Bay changed his mind again. Now he was saying, ‘The existing alignment would have been shorter and cheaper.’ That was not true. The western alignment would have meant further delay and higher costs as a decision on the Traveston dam was needed before work could start. It is pretty obvious: you would not want to build a highway that would be flooded. Its cost was $646 million. That is $33 million more than the selected option. Rather than further delay this important project after 12 years of inaction, the Rudd Labor government decided to move forward quickly and to provide certainty for local communities—for the families, for the small business operators and for the pensioners for whom you are so concerned. Work is underway and taxpayers are going to see value for money.

There are commitments that the government were elected to fulfil but which the opposition still refuses to let us fulfil because of its obstructionist behaviour in the Senate.

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