Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

As I go through the list of works and all of the funding, it ranges from 83-17, 83-17, 86-14, 86-14 and 80-20. What we are seeing here are weasel words from a minister who, when his own political persuasion was in power in the state government, was quite happy to sit back and accept the funding arrangement. The only thing that has changed is that there has been a change of political persuasion to the coalition in New South Wales. And all of a sudden this minister decides it is a game-changer. All of a sudden he can change the funding arrangement to fifty-fifty from what was, under the nation-building program of 2009-14, a funding arrangement that averaged 80-20.

As I said, I am very fortunate to be the member of an electorate where very shortly the work will be duplicated all the way through my electorate. Last week I took my vehicle on a drive up to Brisbane and I travelled up and down the Pacific Highway. I drove up and I drove back. There are parts of that roadwork that still are very notorious and bad. I am happy that work has commenced. I am happy that work has been committed and is under construction. The people who travel those roads and are affected by those roads care very little about what the funding arrangement is. But I put this to the chamber: if this minister had an ounce of honour in his body in relation to this, he would accept the fact that historically he has been funding these roadworks 80-20 and would continue. This change of pace has only occurred because there has been a change in the New South Wales government.

In this year's budget papers under his 'Nation Building—additional funding for the Pacific Highway', that additional funding is in 2013-14, 2014-15 and 2015-16, with the bulk of it pushed out well and truly into the forward estimates. There is no additional immediate money in 2012-13. Such is the commitment of this minister of this Labor government that in fact it is not until 2013-14 that there is an additional $231 million and in 2014-15 there is $1.025 billion and in 2015-16 there is $1.4 billion. The rhetoric from the minister makes it appear that the money is sitting on the table right now to start the works today. Well, that is not the truth; that is just not the truth—and the budget papers themselves show that to be a fact.

As I said, people want to know when this work will be finished. They do not want the political argy-bargy that is going on; they want outcomes. They want outcomes that will see changes on the Pacific Highway. The minister talks about how choked up he got about the fatal accidents—and I agree with him that they were terrible. I remember the Kempsey bus smash many, many years ago and the fatalities that occurred there. But for this minister to have sat quiet for three years in this House about funding only to raise now his concerns in relation to the levels of funding being contributed by the new coalition government in New South Wales is hypocrisy in itself. The reality is that this minister is not in control of his own budget, does not understand what is required for the outcomes and has done nothing more than play politics with this. Not only is he a member of the same political party as the former state government, but he is also from the same state, New South Wales. That is what makes his assertions even more hypocritical.

What we want to see are real outcomes. What we want to see is the work completed. Members up and down the coast—it does not matter what their political persuasion is—get very heated and animated when it comes to the roadworks on the Pacific Highway. As I understand it, more and more the Pacific Highway is becoming the road of choice over the New England Highway as the preferred access route to Queensland, and it does need to be upgraded. But the reality is that this minister, rather than playing political games, needs to sit down in serious discussions and apply the same level of integrity as he did to the former state Labor government, for whom he allowed the 80-20 funding split. We all want to see the road finished. We want to see the work completed, and that is key and critical.

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