Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

We parliamentarians love infrastructure because we get to put on high-vis vests and hard hats, and walk around and look at the projects we want to build. Of course we want to build infrastructure and increase productivity across Australia, but traditionally Australians do not have a great history of building infrastructure. Back in 1878, in my electorate, a guy called Edward Lascelles got so frustrated trying to build a train track and, because he could not get the government on side, he went and built it himself. That is the train track we are still using. Infrastructure is important, but it is appropriate for the government to have a greater say in the infrastructure needs of the country. I do not think it is completely disingenuous to ask that the government have a greater say with respect to Infrastructure Australia, to use the skills of the people who are on that committee and to marry that up with the skills, pressures and ideas that parliamentarians can bring to the system.

We have to ask ourselves when building infrastructure: what is the difference between convenience and productivity? That will be very important for us. Convenience is getting home 10 minutes earlier on a freeway, but productivity is shifting what we produce for the export market to, hopefully, secondary processing and driving the export dollars that we as a country have to drive.

The problem that concerns me very much—and I know we have harped on for a long time in this House about the carbon tax, but it is a contributing factor, as is red tape, to this problem—is that it has become so expensive in this country to build infrastructure. Even in my home town of Mildura, if the council want to widen the roads, they have to buy carbon offsets in order to do it. That is erring on the side of ridiculous. We have to find a way to drive down the costs of infrastructure. We have to deliver the infrastructure so that we can shift the products that we produce to the ports and restore and grow the Australian economy.

I have a theory—I am going to expound lots of theories in my time here in this parliament and I would hope that there are words of wisdom in them; Wyatt, being a young bloke, you might learn a thing or two from my theories—that the closer you are to the delivery of the infrastructure, the more efficient is the spend. A local council can grade a road much better than the federal government can grade a road. A state government can run a hospital much better than the federal government has ever run a hospital. So there is value in working constructively with all levels of government to build infrastructure.

That is one of the reasons that the Roads to Recovery funding, where the federal government gave money to state councils to build local infrastructure, has been so popular and has proved such a worthwhile spend. That is why Bridges to Recovery will also be important. There is no point in having a great road or a great railway line if we cannot get the 40-tonne B-double over the little country culvert, down the little country road and onto the main road. Well-positioned infrastructure does drive productivity. Government's role is to build the productivity that sometimes a small business cannot build on its own.

Our government wants to develop Northern Australia. Anthony Albanese, the member for I-am-not-sure-where—

Opposition members: The member for Grayndler.

Thank you very much; my apologies. He said that there is a 'need for productivity to determine infrastructure investment' and that 'sometimes the role of government is to build infrastructure so then we can grow productivity; so sometimes it has to be around the other way'. I think there is a very strong argument for the changes to Infrastructure Australia—its management and its charter—and for us having a greater say in how infrastructure is built. We are not completely dismantling Infrastructure Australia; we are building on a good initiative of the Labor government and trying to make it better.

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