Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I've been sitting here listening to this, and you've got to laugh. We're talking about infrastructure, one of the most important things that governments can build, and the government is too lazy to get their infrastructure minister out here. They get out here a minister who is responsible for robodebts. You can rely on him to go and attack pensioners, but he's got no idea about infrastructure. They make all these claims about the East-West Link. Let's put some truth on the bone. The East-West Link would have tied up road funding in Victoria for the next 10 years. There would have been no road funds at all. Look across my electorate of McEwen, one of the fastest growing areas in Australia. This government has not invested one cent in infrastructure. It is the laziest, most incompetent government in the history of this nation.

Let's compare that to when Labor was in government. We invested in new quarantine facilities. We invested in roads. We invested in the NBN. We hear those opposite sprout the continual lie they make day in and day out about mobile phone towers. When you're in government, you're responsible for taxpayers' money. These guys aren't. They just think they responsible for their own money. We were smart. We said, 'Right, if we're going to build a tower, let's make it multiuse. Let's make it do mobile phones. Let's make it do mobile broadband.' That way, instead of having towers everywhere you have one that does everything. Those opposite stopped that when they destroyed the NBN. So then they go into an area like mine, which has suffered the worst natural disaster in Australia's history and put one tower in. Then they sit there and said, 'We've done really well, we've put one tower in!' The government actually scrapped the third round of the Black Spot Program after getting communities to tell it whether they wanted mobile phone towers, so they could take that money to pay off their pork barrelling in their own electorates.

We heard the member for Mallee. He's normally a pretty good bloke, but clearly he's been drinking the water downstream from the member for Forrest's dairy farm. He talked about there being no infrastructure and about the Victoria government. He may want to think back a couple of prime ministers ago to the one who's still here, who sits up the back, who said that the East-West Link was a referendum at the last Victorian election. Guess what? A first-term Liberal government got kicked out of power for Daniel Andrews to get in. The referendum was clear. People did not want all their road funding tied up in a road that delivers nothing.

I sit back and think of the last election. The member for Grayndler was talking about road projects in our area and how we were going to duplicate Craigieburn Road, how we were going to duplicate Bridge Inn Road and the work on the interchange at O'Herns Road—all these big congestion-removal infrastructure projects and not one of them was committed by the Liberal Party. In fact, in the last two terms of government, there has not been one piece of road infrastructure in the fastest-growing area in Victoria. In fact, the hapless Deputy Prime Minister responded to a letter to me saying, 'Oh, the East West Link—we're going to build that. That's a project in your electorate.' It's a minimum of, I think, 60 kilometres away. It has absolutely nothing to do with our electorate at all.

Victorians are sick and tired of this inept, morally bankrupt government ripping us off. Seven per cent of infrastructure funding goes to Victoria, even though Victoria has 25 per cent of the population. We haven't seen a single major project under the last two prime ministers or the last four infrastructure prime ministers. In fact, the biggest project they came to look at was the quarantine centre, which Labor funded. All they did was come. We had the member for New England come and cut a ribbon. That was the single biggest investment that they put in the area.

When your ministers don't know where Victoria is and don't know the funding in Victoria, you sit there and say, 'We have a major problem'—we have a major problem with the inability of an inept government to actually do its job. They want to attack Daniel Andrews. Well, let's have a look at the Mernda rail—a $500 million investment in rail in our communities. One of the biggest things that's been happening in the fastest-growing area of Victoria was delivered by a Labor government. It was not delivered under the four years of the Baillieu and Napthine governments. Whenever Victorians vote, think about one thing: every time there is a Liberal government, you get done over on infrastructure, you get done over on hospitals, you get done over on schools and you get done over on social services. This is a government that has spent too much time fighting itself and not fighting for you.

See this speech in context