Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Medicare) Share this | Hansard source

As with everything that the Morrison government claims, the facts simply don't match the rhetoric. Nowhere is this more apparent than when it comes to infrastructure spending. Let me just quote some of the facts. Under the last Labor government, average annual infrastructure funding doubled from $29 billion to $58 billion. Under the coalition, average annual infrastructure investment has fallen by 17 per cent, to $48 billion. In last year's budget, there was no new money in federal infrastructure funding to the states, territories and local governments. That funding is declining each year. In 2018-19, the figure is $6.3 billion. The next year, it's $5.6 billion. The year after, it's $5 billion. In 2021-22, it's $4.5 billion. The facts speak for themselves. This is at a time when the population of Australia is growing, cities are more congested than ever before and Australia needs more infrastructure, not less.

Now let me turn to South Australia for a moment. I notice that the minister, in his response in this debate, did not mention South Australia once. For South Australia, this government's infrastructure funding track record is appalling, and it would be even worse were it not for the projects that were initiated by the last Labor government. In 2018-19, South Australia will get $504 million. In 2019-20, it will get $311 million. In 2020-21, it will get $136 million. That is just three per cent of the infrastructure budget. South Australia has seven per cent of the population and 11.8 per cent of the nation's roads. Even worse, the money allocated is never expended. South Australia's supplementary local road funding of $20 million per annum, which has been paid to South Australia for almost two decades because of an anomaly in the national distribution of those funds, was cut during the first years after this government came to office.

Let's see what the South Australian business community had to say about the government's 2018 infrastructure budget. This is not the Labor Party's response; this is the business community. I'll quote directly from a statement put out by the South Australian chamber of mines and energy, the South Australian Freight Council, the Royal Automobile Association and the Civil Contractors Federation South Australia when they slammed the federal budget as 'a misleading, untimely, and inauspicious deal for South Australia'. Evan Knapp, the executive officer of the South Australian Freight Council said:

This year’s Federal budget is all smoke and mirrors and delivers none of the promise of the pre-budget announcements.

Victoria Griffith, acting CEO of the Civil Contractors Federation, said:

South Australia cannot afford to have delays and gaps in the infrastructure pipeline. We require clear detail from the Government as to how these projects will come to fruition.

These organisations know exactly what infrastructure money they will get, because they depend on it. They do the figures better than anybody else, and when they criticise the government, as they did, the facts and the picture is absolutely clear.

Equally inciting South Australians was that South Australia was allocated a measly $3.7 million, or one per cent, of the government's Roads of Strategic Importance program. It froze the financial assistance grants to councils for three years, when most of that money goes into infrastructure funding. Again, who misses out? The councils and the infrastructure that they were going to build.

This government simply doesn't get it. Infrastructure funding is an investment. It's an investment in jobs, it's an investment in productivity, it's an investment in raising the living standards of all Australians and it's an investment that makes this country competitive with countries around the world. And yet what we see is a government that is prepared to come into the parliament year after year and talk about having 'infrastructure prime ministers'. But when it comes to really delivering the dollars that are going to build the infrastructure that is needed, we don't actually see them. What we see is a shifting of money from one side to the other; re-announcement of projects which have already been committed to and re-announcement of projects that were committed to in previous years as well.

Infrastructure is not built with spin, it is built with real dollars. This country has, according to some estimates, an infrastructure deficit of around $800 billion. It is time that this government—the Morrison government—understood what that really means in terms of this government's productivity and so on. We can only be serious about building the infrastructure that this government needs to build if we put the dollars on the table that are needed.

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