Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. You are right—there is no point of order. But just in case: I was using the general rather than referring to any particular member, so, if the member took offence, I apologise to him; none was meant.

In this bill the minister gives himself a range of very specific powers over things that he decides can or cannot be done. He can order Infrastructure Australia to evaluate particular projects nominated by him and only him. Through this bill, the minister will become Infrastructure Australia—so you may as well not have Infrastructure Australia. Let us just stop the sham and the pretence of this bill, by which Infrastructure Australia will be denuded of its capacity to be able to do the job it was put in place to do.

In effect, this bill gives the government the right to sack people—to just get rid of everybody in Infrastructure Australia in one way or the other. I am not only concerned; I am deeply worried. I think it would be more honest of this government to come in and completely get rid of Infrastructure Australia, because that is in effect what this bill will do. All of the powers and all of the decision making will go to the minister, and we will go back to the old days when you only ever got infrastructure if you were in a Liberal Party or a National Party seat and too bad for the others.

This situation had to be changed, and I can remember countless talkback radio programs and people saying that enough was enough and that we needed independence to be able to get on with getting infrastructure built in the national interest and with getting roads to go somewhere—to a small business park, for example—apart from somebody's dam or farm. In other words, the idea was to get infrastructure to where it was needed the most—that is, to the productive capacity of this country. Phrases such as 'productive capacity' get thrown around this place like confetti by people who do not understand at all what they mean, and that is what worries me about what this bill will do.

I will touch, in the couple of minutes I have left, on a project of national significance: the Ipswich Motorway. As I said before, it was a very important project, yet I recall the local Liberal member fighting against it day in and day out. We used have debates on it all the time, and he promised in 2007 that, if he was elected in 2007, the Ipswich Motorway would never go ahead. He wanted to make the Ipswich Motorway a referendum issue in Queensland, but the people of Queensland decided very clearly that they wanted the motorway because they were being strangled to death.

Small businesses, mums and dads—everybody travelled on the road before the motorway was built. I will not get into the road deaths and the associated trauma and social costs before the motorway was built. Since we built the motorway—and it cost a pretty penny; it cost a couple of billion dollars, which was well worth it—there has not been a single death on the motorway. Work that out in a cost-benefit analysis, and tell me what it is worth. Tell me what your cost-benefit analysis tells you about that. Not one family has lost one of its members on the Ipswich Motorway since we built it, and the road was a horror before we built the motorway.

There has been less trauma and fewer accidents since we built the motorway. Trucks and cars no longer break down on that road and get blocked for four or five or six hours in a day.

Productivity went up, and that was a massive saving for small business. If you are trucking something from Toowoomba, Ipswich or Brisbane or to Warwick or Sydney or Melbourne when you go through that road it makes a world of difference. All of that was possible because of programs and institutions that we put into place, because we said enough was enough. We agreed with the Australian people that we had to de-politicise infrastructure and start working as a federal government that said, 'We will play the game of infrastructure.' Well, it is not just up to the states; it is up to us to lend a hand. I recall in the election campaign only a few short months ago that we promised $279 million for the final piece of the Ipswich Motorway and the other mob finally got to the table and said, 'We will put the same money forward,' and as soon as they got in we have not seen the money and I do not think we will see it in the future. This bill is an absolute disgrace.

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