Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to raise two issues, given that there has been a failure to answer any of the questions that have been put with regard to the Pacific Highway, the Bruce Highway, the Gateway project and WestConnex. Firstly, I go to the Gateway WA project, which is one of the projects that the new government is attempting to say was somehow its initiative. I was with the member for Swan at the opening of construction. The project is fully funded, the contract has been signed, and it has been going for two years now. There are 2,000 people working on the project. They are working on the project with funds provided by the federal Labor government, under the same funding system that is being undertaken now by the government in which the Deputy Prime Minister is now transport minister—exactly the same funding. We ensured that Western Australia received record funding; indeed, we more than doubled the per capita funding for infrastructure in Western Australia after 2007.

Another thing we did in Western Australia was the Perth City Link project, a fantastic project that is boosting productivity and changing the nature of Perth by uniting the CBD with Northbridge. In terms of urban projects, there would not be a better one anywhere in the country. In terms of the Labor government's record, whether it be funding roads or funding rail there are significant benefits.

I wonder whether the minister can state whether he agrees with his Prime Minister's comments outlining the ideological underpinning for not funding public transport. He said this in Battlelines, on page 173 and 174:

In Australia's big cities, public transport generally slow, expensive, not especially reliable and still a hideous drain on the public purse.

He went on to say:

Mostly there just aren't enough people wanting to go from a particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to justify any vehicle larger than a car, and cars need roads.

He went on to say:

The humblest person is king in his own car.

So providing an ideological underpinning for this view which accords with what the late Margaret Thatcher said: that if you find yourself at the age of 27 on a public bus you can consider your life a failure. This is the sort of elitist attitude of those opposed to public transport funding.

There is a global debate about cities, about driving productivity, about sustainability. I have just attended the World Cities Summit in Singapore and the debate there was very much about public transport, about how we reduce urban congestion and boost productivity by doing that, and about how we reduce greenhouse emissions and improve sustainability. It is a debate which ministers, including from the Conservative Party in the UK, and other representatives from around the world are having while Australia appears to be going in the opposite direction to the rest of the world. Why is it that the new government does not believe that there is a role for the Commonwealth in providing leadership on cities, including in urban policy and in providing support, where it stacks up, for public transport as well as roads?

The minister opposite said before that somehow they were the only party that supported roads. That, of course, is not true. While I was the transport minister the former government doubled the roads budget, compared with in the previous period. The difference is we support roads and rail. They support roads only, the Greens support rail only, and both are exclusive positions to the detriment of dealing with urban congestion in our cities.

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