Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

One of the advantages of being in government is that you have access to the ideas of some pretty smart people, and the government should start listening to them. Last Friday, the Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, had this to say:

I have been saying this for some years now: with interest rates so low right around the world, including here, we have been trying to induce households to spend money through lower interest rates. It would be a better strategy to create new assets rather than current consumption. The best new assets to create in our country at the moment are infrastructure assets, particularly in transportation networks.

That follows similar comments from Glenn Stevens, his predecessor. It follows the comments last week from the former Secretary of the Treasury, Ken Henry. He said:

… we do not have the infrastructure capacity to support today’s population, far less the population of the future.

In the first two years of this government we saw a 20 per cent decline in public sector infrastructure investment. Every single one of the current government's 12 quarters that they have been in office has had less public infrastructure investment than all 21 quarters when we were in government from the time of our first budget in the June 2008 quarter right through to September 2013. When we came to office in 2007, we were ranked 20th in the OECD for investment in infrastructure as a proportion of GDP. When we left office, we were ranked first—No. 1. We are not any more.

What we see from this government is policy failure. It is policy failure based upon ideology. It is policy failure based upon the fact that when they came to office they made a decision to stop all public transport infrastructure investment—money that was in the budget for the Cross River Rail in Brisbane, the Melbourne Metro, the Gawler line electrification in Adelaide and public transport in Perth.

If you want an example of the government's infrastructure failure, you can have a look at the difference between the rhetoric and the reality. Minister after minister will use this fantasy figure of a $50 billion infrastructure plan. It is a nonsense. The budget papers show that the figure is $34 billion up to the year 2019-20 and then $8 billion into the future until some unspecified time. They are simply making it up as they go along. Indeed, they do not even invest what they say they will. In their 2014 budget they had an undertaking for $8 billion in the last financial year, 2015-16. The actual final budget outcome for investment was $5½ billion. In the face of these facts we have Orwellian propaganda. In the lead-up to the election in the first half of last year, they actually cut the infrastructure budget some $18 million to fund infrastructure ads on TV.

The government have no plan for productivity, traffic congestion or housing affordability. The examples are there. The East West Link in Victoria has seen 45c for every dollar invested. If anyone on the other side wants to give me 100 bucks, I will give them back $45 the next time I see them and we will call it a good deal! That is the way that they see investment in infrastructure.

With WestConnex in Sydney, the tunnel has begun but they do not quite know where it is coming up. Last week residents in my electorate got told that it was a good idea to have a construction site virtually on the grounds of Leichhardt high school. They would not do it at Newington. That would not do it at Trinity Grammar. But apparently a local public high school is fair game and does not matter. In a letter that went to residents, the government actually said that they were still working out the final route. They have begun the project and they have begun the tunnel; they just do not know where it is coming out! That is an example of failure from this government.

But they have learnt nothing. On the Perth Freight Link, they are committing the same mistakes over and over again. It was hauled out of a Wheaties box in the 2014 budget. At the time, the WA parliamentary secretary for transport, Jim Chown, told a parliamentary committee:

… at this stage we have not actually got plans that are worthy of public scrutiny …

All these years later they still do not have a plan that is worthy of public scrutiny. We ask in this parliament of the Prime Minister, who flicked it to his minister: what about the three kilometres in between where the road stops and where the port actually is? The port is on the waterfront. You cannot move the port. You have to take the road to the port—but it is stopping three kilometres short. The minister did not even know that that was the case. The Prime Minister did not know. When he went to Perth on the one visit of his campaign—he will not be back there again, I am sure—he still did not know. He said, 'There will be another final stage.' But we asked in Senate estimates this week about this so-called final stage, and of course the department said they have not received any information about it. Mr Roland Pittar of the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development said:

We have not seen a draft project proposal report for that.

The government are literally making it up as they go along.

But it is worse than that because of what they are saying will happen with this dud proposal if Labor is elected on 11 March. Let's be very clear: Mark McGowan has a mandate to not proceed with the Perth Freight Link and to instead fund Perth's Metronet and a range of road projects that actually are ready to go, will improve road safety and productivity and will go to an end point.

What he has said is: they will hold over that $1.2 billion. Just like they are treating the people of Victoria with contempt—which is receiving 7.7 per cent of the national infrastructure spend, with one in four Australians, with it being the fastest-growing state in Australia and having the fastest-growing city in Australia, Melbourne—they will hold the people of Western Australia to ransom. It stands in stark contrast to what we did in government—Gateway WA, Perth City Link, the Swan Valley Bypass, the Tonkin Highway, the Leach Highway, the Great Northern Highway, the North West Coastal Highway, Esperance port, the upgrade to the transcontinental railway, the upgrade to the state's grain rail network—which was a contribution of $135 million. Then this mob's idea of a project is either to go and open a project so they have had something to do with it or—and sometimes they are quite creative—change the name and pretend it is a new project. A new name is not a new project. The Swan Valley Bypass is the same as NorthLink. It was funded by us.

The fact is that we on this side of the House look forward to working with a Labor government in WA to invest in infrastructure, support jobs and support productivity.

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