Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They're two small side-streets, Member for Dunkley. The road is a state road, but it runs through some shops in Kooyong, one lane each way and on-street parking—a big national priority, this one. It's two side-streets of residential streets, just to make it clear. It was announced in 2019 that the then government was going to give $1.8 million in funding for this set of pedestrian lights. It was such an important national priority that they were going to fund 100 per cent it from their slush fund. They budgeted $1.6 million in the 2019-20 budget. No-one ever answered the question as to where the other $200,000 went, but let's not argue about that. The tender was out this year—$3.6 million. It's doubled. It's just a coincidence, I'm sure, that it's the intersection outside Josh Frydenberg's former electorate office, isn't it? This is how they used taxpayer money: handing out money and favours to their mates and then to themselves outside their own electorate offices.

You would think also that for a national program of this scale there would be some independent assessment of proposals, maybe. There's a thought! A fact: just two of the projects out of the hundreds in the spreadsheets that we've got were referred to Infrastructure Australia for assessment: the Napoleon Road upgrade and the Dorset Road upgrade. What did Infrastructure Australia say about those? I've got the business case evaluation summaries here. They said: 'Not recommended for the infrastructure priority list.' That's what they said. Would you like me to table them? Deputy Speaker Wilkie, can I seek leave to table these documents?

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