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

This is all about infrastructure and the bill in particular and how we have to have Infrastructure Australia. I recall in Queensland in Minister Macfarlane's electorate and looking at Toowoomba, particularly the range bypasses, and a whole range of things that had been promised forever and a day, and forever and a day they still are not delivered. They had nearly 12 years in government and did not deliver it then. They are back in government now and have an opportunity to deliver the Toowoomba range crossing or some new infrastructure and spend some money there. We are all waiting. You have three years so hopefully that will happen. I am always hopeful and I have always been on the record as saying, 'Every road that the coalition government build I will say thank you,' because it is in the national interest. I will not be partisan about it: build a road and I will say, 'Thanks, well done, good job. You ought to get praise for it.'

Unfortunately you are coming in here with a bill that is all about reducing all of that. What this bill actually does is seek to reduce transparency. Right now we have the transparency built in, we have the independence of Infrastructure Australia. We put that into place so that it would be at arm's length, as far away as possible from government so that you would get some sort of advice on really what were the best projects. They were not at the direction of the minister and you could actually work to some sort of formula which said, 'Here is the list of what you should do.' It is always going to be the right of a government to decide on which projects it does and does not do, but at least you had some advice, some sort of form to work to, a council, some independent people that you could really work with. And it has worked really well, if you have a look at what we did in six years.

I am happy to take criticism about a range of things that were not perfect, but the reality is that we did deliver. We not only promised the Ipswich Motorway in my electorate, we delivered the Ipswich Motorway.

The Ipswich Motorway was the biggest, most expensive road upgrade in Australian history, yet when we were in government we delivered it not only ahead of time but also under budget. It was a fantastic alliance project which was delivered by the Commonwealth with the states and which did work because we used a really good formula. We did the same thing on a whole range of other road projects, rail projects and port projects—infrastructure projects across the country. In a short six years, we did more catch-up work on infrastructure in this country than had been seen in nearly 100 years. Before we did the catch-up work, infrastructure was going backwards. That was the problem.

Those on the other side like to bleat on about how they are all great at business; they are all the doyens of business. Good on them—that is great; it is a good call—but plenty of people here have experience too. However, government is not a business in quite the same sense as a small enterprise is a business. Government is not a question of using the kitchen table at home, where you scratch around and say: 'Can we save a few pennies here or there? How is it going to go? Can we meet the budget this week?' Government is a little bit more involved than that. I am sure most of the members on the other side do to get that; I am afraid, though, that I think there are a few who do not. But that is another story.

Government is a little bit more involved than just a home budget, a going-on-a-picnic-on-the-weekend budget or a small-business budget. As complicated as all of those things might be, government is a bit more involved than they are, because it involves doing things which might not give you a return and instead give you something in the future which you cannot put a dollar value on today. When you build a national highway, it might not give you a return today; it might give you a return 25 years down the track. But you build it today—and you might build it a little bit larger than you need it to be today, because you understand the future needs of infrastructure.

All our ports, I can tell you, are already at capacity today—and we need more. So ports are pretty easy to do a cost-benefit analysis on. It is pretty hard to find commuter rail which makes money for any owner, let alone a government. But you build it because you are not a business. That is just the point. As a government, you are not a business; you are in the business of providing services: a social framework, infrastructure and rules. You do the things that other people cannot do. That is why governments exist. Otherwise, we would all just be small businesses.

I love small businesses because I think they are the backbone of this country. They are the largest employer in this country and they all do a great job. But small business relies on government not to be a business. Small business relies on government to provide support services and support-lines and tax concessions—things that do not make money. A support-line to help small businesses does not make money; no-one in the private sector sets them up, because they would go broke overnight. But we still set them up when we were in government. In fact, even this coalition government sets them up and continues to fund the ones that we put in place because it understands the benefit they deliver to small business. You are not going to make money out of such services, but you provide them anyway.

There are also some very expensive services that we started to provide—through websites, for example. There is the National Business Name Register, which the government does not make money out of. In essence, when we were in government we were trying to provide a cheaper service to small business. In the past, under the previous coalition government, if you had wanted to register your business across the country it would have cost you about 1,000 bucks, and you would have had to fill in a different form in every state and territory. It was an absolute, bureaucratic, red-tape nightmare. When we were government, we condensed it to one website and one form. It cost you 30-odd bucks, you did it once, it remembered all your details and you were done. That is how you save money for small business. It is in realising that government is not a business that you can provide really good infrastructure systems and programs such as Infrastructure Australia.

Everything that is contained in this bill does the exact opposite of what it says it does. Under this bill, Minister Truss wants to give himself, personally, very specific powers. Why would a minister want to do that? To me, it harks back to the good old days—or the bad old days—of roads of National Party interest, when a road was a great road as long as it led to your farm or your dam. That was okay; it did not matter which farm or dam, as long as it was your farm or dam. It was too bad that everybody else had to miss out and go down a particular—

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