Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

The Pacific Highway is a major national priority. It is vital that this road be upgraded, and be upgraded as quickly as possible. It carries a large volume of traffic. There are many accidents on the road. There have been many tragedies and much heartbreak. That is why I grieve at the fact that the government is now seeking to turn the construction of this road into some kind of political barney. Instead of putting their shoulders to the wheel they are turning this into a political stunt. They are changing the rules midstream about funding levels and then trying to, somehow or other, blame the New South Wales state government.

The Prime Minister promised the member for Lyne that this road would be duplicated by 2016. I guess that should have been an early marker that the deadline would never be met, because this Prime Minister never honours her word—we are only 12 days away from the carbon tax that we were never going to have. I might add that this is a carbon tax which is going to make the construction of the Pacific Highway more expensive. It will be more difficult to achieve the objective because the cost of building the road will be significantly higher than it would have been without a carbon tax.

The member for Lyne acknowledged quite some time ago that this target was not going to be met—that there was insufficient funding available. He asked questions of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister seemed to walk away from the issue and said that the target was still going to be met. But in reality, all along the government knew that it did not have sufficient funding on the table to be able to make this achievable.

We have just heard the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport say, as he has often said, that he was upset when the New South Wales Labor government started withdrawing funding from the Pacific Highway. Let's make this absolutely clear: the goal of reaching this target by 2016 died when the previous Labor state government in New South Wales started to withdraw funding from the project. It actually cut the funding. Indeed it is true that Mr Albanese, in a letter that he tabled yesterday, criticised the New South Wales Labor government for taking $300 million off the Pacific Highway so that the state government would only be providing $500 million over the period of the memorandum of understanding. He said that he took $48 million from them as a penalty for that. But that is not true. I pointed this out to the minister in this House once before. Reading from his own letter, it is quite clear that the $48 million was withdrawn from the New South Wales government because they had not signed the MOU on time. It had nothing to do with the amount of money in it; they had not signed the MOU on time. So he was taking the $48 million bonus that was available for early signature away from New South Wales.

But do you know how long this penalty lasted? For two paragraphs in the same letter. In paragraph 2 of the letter, he said he was taking the $48 million away. In the same letter, in paragraph 4, he said:

… I have taken a decision to direct an additional $48 million to provide for further duplication works on the Pacific Highway …

So he took it away, and two paragraphs later he gave it back to New South Wales. That is how angry he was with Labor in New South Wales for reducing their funding for the Pacific Highway.

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