Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Youth and Employment Services) Share this | Hansard source

The Morrison government is securing Australia's recovery, and we are out of the ICU. It takes a special kind of member, like the member for Rankin and the member for Ballarat, to get up here and deliver a 10-minute negative speech about what's wrong with this country when we've just seen what's happening here in Australia in the middle of a pandemic where Australians are being kept safe.

I couldn't help but notice the member for Ballarat went on about infrastructure spending during question time. With $110 billion of funding for infrastructure, she wanted to mention some page buried deep in the budget papers—a $188.7 million underspend this year out of $110 billion infrastructure spend. If the member for Rankin and the member for Ballarat are so concerned about infrastructure, they should pick up the phone to the incompetent Palaszczuk government in Queensland and talk to their mate Mark Bailey, who cannot deliver a project in Queensland in a timely manner.

In my own electorate of Petrie, residents and people on the north side of Brisbane would know that projects like Linkfield Road at Carseldine and Bald Hills was promised and funded 2½ years ago, and we're still waiting on the Palaszczuk government to do it. I had a briefing from TMR the other day. They said to me, 'We're going to start in 2023.' Have a guess at when it will be finished. They said to me, 'It's going to be finished in October 2024, right when the next state election is due.' I said to them, 'This isn't good enough.' The member for Lilley and others on that side should pick up their phone to the Palaszczuk government and say that the constituents in our communities on the north side of Brisbane cannot wait another three years for these roads to be built. The federal funding is ready to go. It's available now. It's on the table.

It's not just that project, either. It's the on and off ramps at Griffin and Murrumba Downs. It's the second Gateway upgrade project, from St John Fisher all the way to the Pine River. The member opposite really doesn't understand. The first GUN project was promised prior to the 2013 election, which we won, and it's now finished. I will move on and say that those opposite are very negative, and it's not what Australians are looking for at this time.

Ms Wells interjecting—

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