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

Just before the budget we had the Prime Minister come to town to tell the people of Western Australia that after the sterling efforts made by members of his team he was actually going to take note of the problem that Western Australia had with its GST, and that he agreed that it was unfair that Western Australia was only getting 30 cents in the dollar for its GST. So he was going to make up the gap between what we got last year, which was 37 per cent, and what we were going to get under this new, highly dodgy process that the Grants Commission had embraced. He was going to make the difference up. He was going to give us $499 million. I thought that was great. He is going to give the state of Western Australia a one-off grant. He could not get that resolution on the matter, but he was going to give Western Australia a one-off grant of $499 million. We welcome that. I publicly welcomed it. It was good, following on from the announcement Labor had made a couple of weeks before, that we were going to give a cash grant to Western Australia if we got into government.

However, I thought we should just wait until the budget comes down, because what will be incredibly interesting to see is whether or not we have robbed WA to pay WA. And, sure enough, we have. Sure enough, when we look in the budget over the four years of the forward estimates, we see the one-off grant, the $499 million, was for road infrastructure. We are going to be $499 million better off. But, when we look in the infrastructure budget we see Western Australia has, indeed, $250 million dollars stripped out of the budget. So, he has given us $499 million dollars in one hand, and made much of it. My good friend the member for O'Connor was really excited by this and put a release out saying he 'welcomed the Commonwealth government's investment of an additional $499 million for road infrastructure in Western Australia'. He did not mention that we were actually going to lose $250 million, so in fact what we are getting is $249 million.

Much of the loss has come from scaling back and moving out the much vaunted Perth Freight Link, which indeed is the only new project that this government has undertaken in Western Australia. All the other projects were substantially in the budget. The Perth Freight Link, as the assistant minister was saying earlier on, is a very exciting project. It is an extraordinarily exciting project! It is a project the changes on a daily basis—as they find more and more problems with this cobbled together project they are coming up with new solutions each day. Now we are thinking that in fact this project is going to involve a tunnel—a massive tunnel—which, of course, will add, at the very least, one would expect, some $400 million to the cost of this project. So it now will be something in the order of a $2 billion project, going into a port, which, on the government's own analysis that they put in their alleged business case for this project, will be out of date and will need to be replaced within the next 10 years—indeed, according to this, within eight years. So, within two years—if this actually gets built and they can finally determine what the route is—they are going to be required to build, and have completed, the first stage of a new port down in Cockburn Sound, a port that has indeed been on the cards for the last 10 years at least. We are spending all of this money to try to cobble together a solution going into Fremantle port. Why are we doing this? We are doing this because we took $500 million out of Western Australia. (Time expired)

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