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

It is part of the strategy. I think this is very interesting content. It probably does not interest you—you are not from Western Australia—but the world does not stop at the boundary of Victoria and New South Wales. It is pretty important that you guys come to understand that there is a Western Australian story and we are going to make sure that we tell you about it.

I want to make this point because it is a relevant problem we have today: the share of GST that WA is paying. For every dollar we pay we get 34c back. That really is a great difficulty for us. We understand the whole history and why this equalisation principle came into being, but we do have to ensure that we have a much more sophisticated way of dividing up this pie. When states such as Western Australia are experiencing rapid growth and generating great income, it comes with great expense attached to it. The need for infrastructure, when you are growing so rapidly, is much greater than what is reflected in a pure per capita analysis. I am not going to apologise to these Victorian members who do not want to hear about WA, but we do need to understand that these issues that went to the core of the way in which we structured the Federation—the way our economy was at Federation—are still creating difficulties for us. We need to constantly be alive to those problems and alert to the need of addressing them, and constantly moderating our formulas to ensure that we are getting justice. And not only justice—we are, in fact, acting in such a way that it is of benefit to all Australians.

The member for Swan asked me to say a few things about Roe Highway stage 8. Roe Highway stage 8 is a program that the feds have plucked out of nowhere—a project that has had no assessment from Infrastructure Australia. It is a project which, prior to budget night, they had not once discussed with the state government. The state government had its budget delivered about three nights before the federal budget; it made no reference to the Roe Highway. There was not a cent in the budget for the construction of the Roe Highway. We had the Treasurer of Western Australia saying in estimates recently that his government had made no commitment to this road. We have had the member for Swan telling us this is such an important and critical road for the future.

See this speech in context