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

I too rise to speak on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2021-2022 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2021-2022, which are the government's appropriation of money to spend on the things that it believes are the most important things to do. They provide the opportunity for us in opposition to comment on the government's decision-making—particularly, for me, when it comes to the portfolio I represent within the Labor Party: infrastructure, transport and regional development.

Before I do that, I want to make some commentary about what we're seeing in the parliament at the moment. It is very, very clear that we are only weeks from a federal election. At that election we will have a government that has been in office for nearly a decade seeking a second decade in office—a long time in government. If you didn't know that an election was imminent, you would just have to watch question time. When you see some of the ministers and the way in which they're behaving, that will show you. With that election on the horizon, we are seeing them throw out a whole lot of things—as you do—to see what's going to stick as messaging to damage Labor, whether it is the, frankly, dangerous politicisation of national security, something we unfortunately see the Liberal-National Party do often at election times, a very dangerous precedent indeed; re-announcing infrastructure projects for the third time, which we saw again on the weekend; pitting sections of the community against each other, as we saw with the Religious Discrimination Bill, as somehow a way to achieve an electoral advantage, as we saw last week; and, as we've been seeing through Senate estimates, the topping-up of slush funds in anticipation of being able to announce and spend those in the election. We've even seen the Treasurer—pretty unedifying for a Treasurer of this nation—digging up, through the dirt unit, speeches from the Leader of the Opposition from national conference and carrying on about those in parliament.

The reality is that what we're seeing from this decade-old government is a real division as they go into the election campaign, where they have members of the backbench clearly unhappy and saying so publicly. We've got leaking from cabinet at a fairly serious and senior level, including again yesterday. We've got a Prime Minister, I think, who is trying to rally the troops but is finding it very difficult to do so. That's the context in which we're going into an election. It does say everything about this government that, last night, when we had a senior journalist tweet that there was a scandal-prone cabinet minister about to go, everyone was going, 'Which one?' There are so many of them in this government who have behaved in such an inappropriate way that there were a few bets on who that might be.

In terms of the appropriations and the portfolio I represent, there are a few comments I want to make. I want to start with regional development. The damning thing about this decade-long government is that they have not had a regional economic development policy in the period that they've been in office. They've had a lot of different programs—and I will talk a bit about those programs—and there's been lots of commentary, but there actually hasn't been an overall policy for how you grow regional Australia and look at the disparate nature of regional Australia and the different natures of the economies that many of us represent across this parliament. No one political party has the monopoly on regional seats. The National Party hold some, the Liberal Party hold some, the Independents hold some and the Labor Party hold some. The thing that unites us all is that, as proud regional members, we know our economies are incredibly diverse, they have experienced disaster and COVID in different ways, and we actually do need to have a proper regional economic development policy that looks at how we maximise the contribution that our regions make to our economy as a nation and how we make sure that they are places that we can all live in.

Unfortunately, as I've said time and time again, when the National Party continues to have its hands on the regional funding buckets, the funding is simply not disbursed fairly. We've seen that particularly with the Building Better Regions Fund. We will be looking very closely at the decisions. Round 6 closed just recently. We had many local councils ringing our MPs to say, 'Is it worth us bothering to put in for this program, given our experience, over the last decade of this program, of spending huge amounts of time, money and effort to put applications in and really not getting a look-in?' Apparently, that's the way the Deputy Prime Minister thinks you look after the regions.

Ahead of the last election, we saw coalition seats and coalition target seats receiving 94 per cent of all projects and 94 per cent of all funding for the infrastructure component of the BBRF. That cannot be explained, as those opposite constantly try to do, by saying, 'We hold more regional seats.' If that's what you're going to do, Labor holds 13 per cent of the regional seats in this place, so you would think a fair distribution might be that we get 13 per cent of the funding, at least. That's certainly not what has happened. One hundred and twelve of the 330 projects approved under round 3 of the program were approved by a secret ministerial panel and against the department's own recommendations. We've had $1 billion used in a partisan political way under this government, and that has not assisted regions across the country. I have no doubt that the sixth round will be used in exactly the same way.

How does the Deputy Prime Minister think that is helping all regions across the country? If he thinks the program is good for regional Australia, he should go and say that in Bendigo and Newcastle, which have received less than $2 million, under this decade-long government, out of the program. Geelong has received just over $2 million. Lyons, in regional Tasmania, has received $5.5 million, and Dobell, on the Central Coast, has received $50,000 in funding. That's the contrast. Day after day I hear MPs on the other side getting up and saying, 'I've got this amount of money and this amount of money.' Well, that's great for you, but it's not great for every region across the country. That's why the Building Better Regions Fund has delivered $57 million to the Deputy Leader of the National Party's own electorate, $27 million to the former Leader of the National Party's electorate and $22.4 million to the current Deputy Prime Minister's electorate. There's a bit of a pattern. The fund isn't about developing regions and developing the economy of our regions; it has been used constantly for political pork-barrelling.

I can 100 per cent guarantee that, under an Albanese Labor government, we will fund programs in our regions. We will absolutely do that, but what we will not do is have the waste and rorts that we've seen under this government, which have now gone beyond the pale. I caution the government again, in the lead-up to round 6, that the Australian National Audit Office is having a look at this program. It's unfortunately not due to report until June—it was due to report in May, but that has been put back. I think you will find there will be a fair amount of scrutiny on the way in which decisions about this program have been made.

We want to have a grants program that regional communities can trust and that delivers funding through an equitable, fair and transparent process to the communities across the country that need it. That is the type of program that regional Australia, regional organisations and regional local governments are calling out for—one that they can trust, not one that sees them having to waste valuable time and money on applications that, frankly, are doomed from the start.

I'll turn away from regional, now, to look at the infrastructure programs across the country. Of course, in this appropriation bill we're talking about the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook and the appropriations that come through that in particular. The day before, we saw the government again trumpeting its commitments on infrastructure. It said there'd be $1.6 billion of new spending in Queensland, $3.3 billion for New South Wales and $3 billion for Victoria, but that's not what has actually been happening—and I think this is partly the product of the government not expecting that it would win the 2019 election. It went out there and didn't negotiate, particularly with Labor states, about what it was going to spend money on. It made all of these announcements about money it was going to spend, but it has not been able to get that money out the door and deliver it.

In Queensland they've spent $30 million. That's been the investment of the Commonwealth on infrastructure. In Victoria, they've actually spent next to nothing, and in New South Wales they've spent next to nothing. In fact, they've hardly committed anything to public transport in New South Wales at all. I know infrastructure projects take time to get off the ground, but the reality is that, if you don't negotiate with states and territories about what those spends are going to be—as they didn't do in the last election campaign—you often see that money sitting in the budget and on the books for a long period of time without actually being delivered to communities. Of course, that doesn't even recognise the fact that in the last budget what this government did was cut infrastructure spending again. I quote from page 84 of Budget Paper No. 1, where it says the Infrastructure Investment Program was expected to decrease by $3.3 billion over the four years to 2023-24. It was a cut.

So we've seen a wasteful government, the most wasteful government since Federation, racking up $1 trillion of debt, but they've still managed to cut infrastructure spending in that time. Of course, as we know, the government wasn't really that worried about actually delivering infrastructure spending; it was more interested in the announcement. If you want to look at an area where this government has been pretty woeful in its capacity to actually implement programs and to actually deliver—and there are plenty; there's a big, long list—it spent an enormous amount of time advertising the Urban Congestion Fund and advertising and getting headlines for commuter car parks and all sorts of things, but the actual delivery, the actual building, has been completely and utterly woeful. After almost a decade, the government has no clear ideas left, beyond making announcements that they know they will not actually deliver and writing cheques that will never be cashed by state governments or local councils, in some instances, to build roads.

When you look at major projects, you see exactly the lack of seriousness that the government has had. I do want to say that, in terms of the Inland Rail project, which was started by Labor—that's something the Deputy Prime Minister seems to keep forgetting, that the first $1 billion of investment actually came from a Labor government—we have seen costs blow out. It's pretty extraordinary, really. They started off at $4.4 billion. Then it went to $9.3 billion. The cost blowout of Inland Rail is now $14.3 billion. That's what is sitting on the books for this program—$14.3 billion, from, initially, $4.4 billion. Incredibly, there is still no plan for where the route is going to end—or for where it starts, really, and how it's going to get to the port. This project is too important to stuff up, but, unfortunately, that has been what the government has been doing. We need to fix it.

I want to go to Labor's record on infrastructure when we were last in office. I am so proud to follow in the footsteps of the Leader of the Opposition, Anthony Albanese, one of Labor's Infrastructure shadows. Hopefully, I will be able to transition, if we're fortunate enough to win government, into being Infrastructure minister. There are a few of us women in that portfolio now. I know my colleagues in WA and Victoria are two fabulous women I'm really looking forward to working with.

As we look to build back better from COVID, effective transport policy and targeted infrastructure investments are going to help build equity into the hearts of communities across Australia. We know that we need to build infrastructure so that transport is not a constraint on people's lives but, instead, an enabling force allowing them to thrive. This will see us build on our proud record.

The last Labor government more than doubled the infrastructure spend per person across the country. We doubled the roads budget and we rebuilt a third of the interstate rail network. We invested more money in public transport than all previous federal governments combined. We worked collaboratively with the states. We didn't try and pick fights with them. We invested in nation-building projects in partnership with the states, like the Pacific Highway duplication, Cross River Rail and metro projects in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. We began work on Inland Rail, and we were in the process of advancing high-speed rail.

We worked to take the politics out of infrastructure, with Infrastructure Australia, a body that, unfortunately, has been sidelined by this government. We went from 20th to second on the international league table which ranks countries by the scale of investment they're making in their infrastructure. When we left office, our nation was investing more than any other major advanced economy, with the exception of South Korea. It was a very proud record, which we intend to build on. We know how important it is not just to talk about infrastructure but to actually deliver.

After a decade, Australians know everything they need to know about this government. The government are addicted to waste, they're addicted to rorting and they're desperate to hold onto power. They pretend to be good economic managers, but all they've delivered is a trillion dollars of debt, a budget full of rorts and nothing to show for it beyond a few colour-coded spreadsheets. It is the most wasteful government since Federation and it is one that should be, by all rights, defeated resoundingly at the next election. (Time expired)

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