Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

and saw how off the radar we were—yes, in 2001 it changed—and that the cause of this was not hostility but unfamiliarity. The east-coasters had travelled on each other's roads but not on ours. WA was almost a foreign country. I always remember that around 2003 I obtained a leaked copy of the proposed new national transport plan charting the roads that would attract Commonwealth funding. The east coast was crisscrossed like a game of snakes and ladders, joining all those economically important towns: Tamworth, the Stand by Your Man capital; Mildura, very important for dried fruit; Shepparton, which does canned fruits—all very important. But I pointed out that WA just had one road east and one road north, and it did not even include the Burrup. I was asked, not, 'Where's the Burrup?' but, 'What's the Burrup?' It was, of course, one of the major export-earning areas for the country, producing vast tonnages of natural gas and iron ore.

It has often been pointed out that WA for many years has been the net beneficiary of Commonwealth transfers, but people are not so familiar with the fact that WA's future development was actually held back for a good decade by federal policy indifferent to our needs. Most of Australia's iron ore is in WA, and, in the latter half of the 1930s, Japanese interests wished to reopen and expand mines that were there. The government of the day understandably did not want to offend the Japanese but did not want to facilitate their war effort, so they deliberately sexed down the estimates of our iron ore reserves and said to the Japanese, 'Oh gosh, sorry, we don't have much of the stuff; we'll need to keep it for our own use,' a totally sensible posture at the time. Of course, once the war was over, Western Australians just presumed that the truth would prevail, but throughout the 1950s the federal government refused to lift the ban, and it was not until 1960 that WA was allowed to export iron ore—to commence development for the export of iron ore and to take that great leap forward.

Today WA gets 44c in every GST dollar it collects under a deal negotiated by conservative governments of Howard and Court. I do not expect the GST arrangements to change anytime soon, but there are many other ways in which funding metrics are designed for the economic structures of the eastern seaboard and in that way are skewed against our very different economy.

We are growing rapidly. Our contribution to GDP has gone up from 10 to 14 per cent in the last 10 years. To sustain this extraordinary growth, we do need more federal assistance with infrastructure. I want to particularly acknowledge the support of Martin Ferguson and the then minister for infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, for being so responsive to our case and for massively boosting federal spending in WA infrastructure, even making the investment into those previously off-the-map Pilbara port roads.

But it is not only road funding that we need. Perth is growing by 1,000 people a week, and our public transport needs some massive investment to keep our city functioning. It is an environmental issue, as private passenger transport is a major contributor to our carbon footprint. It is also an increasingly important social issue, with family and community life being compromised by long commute times and residents of outer suburbs spending as much as 20 per cent of their income on private transport. And it is an economic issue: 78 per cent of Western Australians live in greater metropolitan Perth. It is a population that drives the mining industry that is fuelling our national economy.

Indeed, 80 per cent of Australians live in big cities. More than ever, we need a federal government that understands the economic importance of cities and how central mobility is to exploiting the diversity and specialisation of skills that are at the heart of the economic benefit of a city. I had the opportunity to oversee the doubling of Perth's passenger rail system in just six years. We showed that, if you provide first-class public transport alternatives, commuters will convert in droves. We saw public transport use in the area increase immediately by more than 350 per cent and substantial increases in patronage across the network. Expanding the network makes the entire network more attractive.

It is preposterous that we have a federal government that says, 'We don't do cities and we don't do metropolitan rail.' When was the last time we actually had a Liberal federal transport minister or a conservative federal transport minister from the city? I am very proud to be part of the Labor team that has a long commitment to the cities and to delivering the infrastructure that will allow the cities to thrive and to provide their residents with a good life, and that is what we are here for: to understand and deliver those things that we need as a community to allow each and every Australian to have their place in the sun. It is as simple as that.

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