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

I rise as the shadow minister—and the minister elect, the way this government is going. I can answer the question from the member opposite, which was, 'What will the impact be of the $10 billion national rail fund?' The answer is zip, because there are zero dollars this year, zero dollars next year and zero dollars the year after. You do not announce a program for the next term in your first term and pretend that it is real. Then, when it is actually funded, the first year is $200 million and the next is $400 million. It is a great example of the illusion that is this government's budget—an illusion that includes the Bruce Highway. Here are the figures—they are on page 133 of Budget Paper No. 2—on the Bruce Highway. It says:

The Government will provide $908.6 million over seven years from 2016-17 for infrastructure projects including—

And it includes the Bruce Highway projects. It says:

The cost of this measure with the exception of the Far North Collector Road will be met from within the existing resources of the Infrastructure Investment Programme.

There it is in black and white: there is not an extra dollar for these infrastructure projects—not one dollar—apart from the Far North Collector Road. That is on page 133 of Budget Paper No. 2.

Of course, before the budget we saw the establishment of the Infrastructure Financing Unit. That has now been renamed the 'Infrastructure and Project Financing Agency', perhaps because those opposite worked out that the acronym was not the best. Eventually, they worked that through. That is the minister's contribution: working out that that was a bad acronym. But the fact is that the industry thinks it is totally unnecessary. This is what the industry said:

iii. We cannot identify any currently proposed infrastructure projects which are commercially viable and not already attracting finance; therefore we cannot see how the IFU will increase the pace of infrastructure project delivery;

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vii. Commonwealth debt or equity investments provide an illusory benefit to the budget’s bottom line, but the Commonwealth is also taking equity or … risk on complex projects – meaning that risky investments' in marginal projects will likely never be repaid;

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1. The IFU should not be established.

That is what was said. And what this government did was take $17 million out of the construction budget administered by the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development to fund bureaucrats at the high end in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. They actually reduced the money that was intended for road and rail infrastructure in order to fund this unit. That is a solution looking for a problem. There is not a lack of financing available in this country for good infrastructure projects; what there is a lack of is a pipeline of projects and proper planning for projects.

One of those projects in which there is not a problem is the Cross River Rail. On 30 April 2013 I received a letter from Scott Emerson, the then minister in Campbell Newman's government. Campbell Newman confirmed on TV on Monday night that this was a project that was absolutely ready to go and that the details had been sorted out thanks to Infrastructure Australia and thanks to negotiations between the two levels of government. There was a five-point plan, confirmed in writing minister to minister by Mr Emerson. The letter said:

It goes on about equal capital contributions of $750 million each. It goes on about funding the availability payment stream for the PPP component of the project on a 50-50 basis for the duration of the concession period. It committed the Queensland government to funding rail operating expenses for the project. It said:

That is exactly what some of those opposite, who think they have discovered these things called 'value capture' and 'public-private partnerships', do not seem to understand—that it was happening and it got stopped in the 2014 budget, just like the funding and agreements for the Melbourne Metro got stopped before that budget. It is quite farcical that the government has established this unit, which will not be able to achieve anything at all, and is establishing a rail fund asking for bids when projects that were approved by Infrastructure Australia five years ago and funded in a budget four years ago remain unfunded due to this government's intransigence. (Time expired)

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