Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

And then of course there is the other standard claim we hear that there are no rail projects that this government is committing to. That is not true either. With this shadow minister you have to check the facts. For the Perth-Forrestfield Airport rail link $490 million was committed by this government.

Those opposite claim that we are not spending any money on rail, but we are. There is the Flinders Link, the connection between the Flinders Medical Centre and the Adelaide metropolitan rail line: $43 million. There is the Sydney Metro, a transformative rail project in Sydney: $1.7 billion committed by this government. There are the Gold Coast Light Rail, $95 million; Canberra light rail, $67 million; and inland rail, $894 million. The claim that there are no new projects is completely wrong. The claim that there are no rail projects is completely wrong. Do not trust what you hear from this shadow minister, because the reality is that this government is delivering on a $50 billion infrastructure program. Announced in 2014, our commitment was that the package we announced that night would take the government's total investment to $50 billion by the end of the decade, spending between 2013-14 and 2019-20, and we are precisely on track towards delivering that.

Then, of course, we hear the claim from the shadow minister that in some way the coalition government is spending less on infrastructure than Labor did, and that is simply not true. Here is a simple comparison, which I encourage anybody who has got the budget papers to engage in. Take the four-year forward estimates in Labor's last three budgets and the four-year forward estimates spending on infrastructure in the coalition's first three budgets. The average under the coalition is $27.9 billion, 54 per cent more than under Labor in the last three years.

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