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

The audacity is the exactly the word—tyring to bring the disaster that she brought to Perth on a national scale. So we will be building the Perth Freight Link absolutely.

There have been some specific questions. I might firstly address the member for Boothby's question about the Darlington project and the North-South Corridor. Of course it is the Abbott government that is funding nearly a billion dollars worth of works on the North-South Corridor—projects that would not have been built under the former Labor government, particularly in Darlington.

The Darlington project in the member for Boothby's electorate would not have been built by the former government and the former minister, who did not like the project—often promised. However, he did at one point: he wanted to build the project back in 2008. The member for Boothby is very familiar with this torrid tale. It took the Abbott government to break through the mess of this on the North-South Corridor to build not only the Torrens to Torrens project—which wasn't a priority of the Labor government until the Darlington project became a priority of the Abbott opposition and then it became a priority of the former government. That is how they did infrastructure in those days.

We do not do it like that anymore; we do it on the basis of good economic information, and the Darlington project is one of those projects that had to go ahead. The whole corridor will be done. The whole corridor, thanks to the infrastructure Prime Minister, will be done in a decade. That is why we paid for the plan which has now been released, albeit not in the organised fashion we had hoped. Now that it has been released, we will be delivering the North-South Corridor and we will shortly have more to say about how we are going to do that. As far as the Darlington project is concerned, there will be work underway this year as promised, committed and delivered under the Abbott government. So the member for Boothby can reassure his constituents that this project will be delivered.

There were also questions in relation to the new Stronger Communities program that was announced in the budget. I can inform the member for Franklin and other members in this House that there will be more detail about this project released in the very, very near future. We will work through the ways to deliver this project in an efficient manner and it looks like we are off to a division.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12:23 to 13:13

Federation Chamber adjourned at 13:13

See this speech in context