Pat Conroy (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to raise the vexed matter of East West Link and the very damning audit that the Australian National Audit Office released regarding the federal funding of this project. Just to set some context, this is a project that this government decided to fund at the expense of shovel-ready public transport projects that had been committed to under the last Labor government. This government, when it came to power in 2013, cancelled vital public transport projects and deferred assistance for some of these projects to fund this dog of a project. This is a dog of a project that economic modelling showed would return 45c for every dollar of funding invested. Let me repeat that: 45c for every dollar spent—that is how awful this project was!

I have read a few ANAO reports in my time, and this has to take the cake for the quality of the condemnations in the findings. I will just to go through a few of them. Firstly, the government approved $3 billion in funding before a merit assessment of the project had been completed. The then Liberal Victorian government did not even submit it to Infrastructure Australia for stage 2, and this joke of a federal government approved it without the project having been presented to or assessed by Infrastructure Australia, the vital independent expert body in this field. Secondly, this approval was contradictory to warnings from the minister's own department to wait until the assessment had been completed. The department tried to act honourably in this process and they were sidelined by the Abbott-Turnbull government and its ideological obsession with road funding. Thirdly, again, the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development warned against making a $1½ billion advance payment, when there was absolutely no need to. Its own department warned there was no need to allocate and divert $1½ billion into advance payments. Fourthly, the ANAO found that this decision was driven purely by the government's cynical desire to inflate the 2013-14 budget deficit and reduce its horrendous 2014-15 budget deficit. It is very rare for the ANAO to go to the political motivations of government—they are usually a bit more circumspect—but in this case they made it very clear that the only reason this government chose to make these advance payments was to inflate a budget deficit.

See this speech in context