Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Road Safety and Freight Transport) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great pleasure to speak on the matter of public importance today, where the opposition have highlighted the need for the government to apply the highest standards of due process and probity in spending decisions. There is no greater probity and oversight than we have in road safety and some of the programs that I have direct oversight of. Road safety is such an important part. It's one of the rare issues that have bipartisan support in this place. Throughout each of the states in this country, there is a road safety committee set up which is chaired by a government member.

To put it in context: roughly, each committee would have a member from each state police jurisdiction and it would have, more than likely, someone from the Local Government Association. In every situation, you would have a royal automobile club represented on that body. Then you've got the fringe groups that could potentially be there, ranging from parents and friends associations, bicycle associations, pedestrian associations and motorcycle associations. They scatter through. They look over a period of matrixes to offer a list of where government funding should be prioritised. That level of probity and that level of consideration and consultation with the public is how I conduct road safety programs in the country.

In addition, we have a $4.5 billion program called Roads of Strategic Importance, with just under $2 million of that quarantined for northern Australia. We have done, again, some of the most comprehensive consultation right across the top of northern Australia, and as we speak there are—as there were last week—further consultation processes with regional councils along the primary corridors that we have identified. We want to make sure that we park these significant investments into the next decade in the places they are most needed, and in order to do that we throw a wide net when we're sourcing where the priorities are. We throw that wide net with our partners, with local government, with communities, and with stakeholders like the construction and the engineering firms, to make sure that we get those investments right. And it's not an infinite bucket, but we do try to make sure that we have a process where—

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