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

Just continuing on with Leppington—I didn't quite finish my questions there—in particular the issue is around how the minister has allowed the department to, in essence, investigate itself during this process. We haven't seen the department or the minister undertake a fully independent investigation. The code-of-conduct investigations the department is undertaking are very limited in scope and have excluded significant events and activities that have occurred in this matter. Significantly, they have excluded activities including the briefing to Minister Fletcher in January 2018. That is not being looked at in the code-of-conduct investigations. In fact, as we understand it, the officer who is involved in that has been excluded from the code-of-conduct investigations because of that. They have excluded decisions that were made around the Northern Road alignment. Again, I would say that that is a complete failure of an investigative process if that is the case. Minister, can you undertake to inform yourself of the breadth or the lack of breadth of each of those investigations—there are six separate investigations that I understand the department is undertaking, but in particular the code-of-conduct investigations—and undertake to ensure that they are broader in scope than they currently are and that any reports of those investigations, in the interests of transparency and to make sure that this does not happen again, will be made public? Particularly I want to draw attention to the critical flaws within the department's chosen route for the Northern Road alignment. We had global aviation planning firm Landrum & Brown finding serious issues with the proposed Northern Road alignment and labelling it a no-go. The department of infrastructure went ahead regardless of that, despite possible impacts on a future second runway for the airport. Minister, is it correct that the placement of this road may impact future development of the airport? How can Australians have confidence in the way major projects are delivered under this government if this is the kind of behaviour that goes on?

Turning to the infrastructure part of the portfolio and some of the comments of the minister, Minister Tudge, we have sought for the government to table the jobs multiplier that it is using in the claims it is making around the jobs of infrastructure. There are multiple numbers of jobs multipliers around, and we'd be very keen to see, given what we saw with some of the government's claims around its JobMaker program, exactly what multiplier the government is using when it makes the claim, as Minister Tudge just did, that 30,000 jobs will be created as a result.

The budget papers did, as the minister outlined, contain a number of road projects, and I want to go to a few of these. The minister, in the New South Wales package, and in the budget night media release, identified additional funding for the Bolivia Hill upgrade on the New England Highway as one of the budget highlights. Can the minister confirm that the project was in fact funded under the previous Labor government in 2012 and that, as we understand it, it is under construction and almost finished now? Can you confirm that the funding you announced in the budget is not going towards completing work that's already been done or that is already underway but is in fact going to an expansion or a new stage of the Bolivia Hill project?

Another highlight was an additional $119.1 million for the Bruce Highway Caloundra to Sunshine motorway and an additional $37 million for the Bruce Highway Rockhampton northern access upgrade. Can the minister confirm that this is additional funding and that it will not go towards delivering the already scoped project but is in fact a new part of the project? If it's not then you need to be able to say very clearly why these budget cost blowouts have occurred in these projects and be up-front about them being cost blowouts rather than your committing to brand-new projects or brand-new parts or stages of those roads.

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