Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

So absolutely generous of you, Member for Dawson! More than one-quarter of the $3 billion was funnelled to just four Liberal seats: Higgins, Deakin, La Trobe and Boothby. The urban commitments even extended to the regional seats of Corangamite, Robertson, Fisher and Bass, all either held or targeted by the Liberal Party. They are pretty sensitive about this because they know, once the Australian National Audit Office has a look at this program, sports rorts will pale compared to what you've done with this one.

Meanwhile, 23 urban Labor seats and 13 regional city Labor seats missed out absolutely completely. On so many occasions, the relevant state governments or local councils didn't even know that the commitment was being made. Those in non-government seats did get some of the money spent on them; however, it's just that it came in the form of $17 million worth of taxpayer funded advertising telling us how good this program was.

Road congestion in our major cities is set to double over the next decade, but, rather than addressing that with a solid plan consistently looking at where road congestion is across the country, the government has only been guided by what would assist them most electorally. This is a $3 billion program. We talked about $100 million with sports rorts and $150 million with sports rorts 2. This is a $3 billion government program.

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