Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Half of this may be cleared up if we say out loud to the member for Grayndler that he did not do all bad things when he was in government. Some things that he did were good things. Now that we have cleared that up, we can say that with certain projects the member for Grayndler, as a federal minister, allocated taxpayers' money which has achieved good outcomes. I am very happy to put that on the record. If that makes the member for Grayndler a little bit happier, I am glad that may help clear up this debate, finally getting us to an actual vote and moving the legislation through. The debate we are having at the moment has nothing to do with the proposed amendment. It is about getting on the record what the member for Grayndler thinks was his record. We will happily say some of the things the member for Grayndler did were good things and some of the things he announced with taxpayers' money prior to the election on 7 September continue today. Of course they do. But it was not the member for Grayndler's money. It was not the Labor Party's money. It was taxpayers' money, and the new government, which was rightfully voted in on 7 September, has an obligation to tell taxpayers what is happening with its money. That is why we have put in place more transparency.

Mr Albanese interjecting—

We are not announcing that these things are new. The member for Grayndler is struggling to get past what happened. I accept that. But we will say that some things he did were good. We refer to the Productivity Commission and say some of the system we inherited was bad. So there we go: a little from column A, a little from column B.

To one of the points the member for Melbourne raised—and I will not say I agree with him on this—about the NBN: if you look at the draft Productivity Commission report, he is right to point to the NBN, because it is the pin-up boy example of how not to do infrastructure. You cannot blame the member for Grayndler for that, because he inherited it at the end of his reign as a minister but was not responsible for its process in the first place.

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