Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We need to stop infrastructure spending being an ideologically driven roads based slush fund and put some transparency and rigour around it. This Prime Minister came and said, 'We will spend $1½ billion on a toll road through the middle of Melbourne', without even seeing a business case and without Infrastructure Australia even having recommended it as one of its priority projects. What they have recommended as being ready to proceed and being useful is Melbourne Metro. As Melbourne grows, like other cities around the country, we are going to need to expand our public transport infrastructure. As long as we have a Prime Minister who thinks the federal government does not even fund public transport—despite the fact that even in Melbourne you have the regional rail link being near completion, thanks to Commonwealth funding—then this is going to continue.

So, there is a very simple choice for the government to make at the moment. When they come in here and bluff and bluster about cost-benefit analyses and have spent the last three years saying they could not support the NBN because it did not have a cost-benefit analysis, are they prepared to do the same with an $18 billion road project through the middle of Melbourne, or are they just prepared to sign off on it without even a cost-benefit analysis?

There is a very simple option. I hear injections asking if it is $18 billion. Yes, it is, because what the members of the government may not know is that this government is in fact prepared to fund stage two of the project, despite there not even being a proposal on the table as to what it would look like. No-one knows where the road is actually going to go, but the Liberal government has been prepared to not only say they will fund it but to hand over money to the Liberal state government to buffer them before the state election.

There is a very simple way to ensure that taxpayers' money is not spent on things like the East-West link, which will turn out to be an albatross around the neck of federal and Victorian taxpayers for years to come, and that is to require transport projects to be independently assessed and have a cost-benefit analysis done, and then release it. If the government were serious, if they want us to take them seriously when they say that they are the best economic managers and everything should run through a cost-benefit analysis, then do the same for big road projects and publish the business case.

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