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

No, it's true. I was supposed to speak on it when it was last listed, last time. I think I'm the last government speaker, but I didn't want to miss this chance, because infrastructure policy has been a long-standing interest of mine, having been a senior public servant in the department of infrastructure in Victoria, working for both sides of politics. But it is a challenging bill for the Liberal and National parties. I might issue some trigger warnings at the start, some phrases I'm going to use which may upset them: 'independent review of Infrastructure Australia', 'Infrastructure Australia will be restored to an independent advisory function', or, put more plainly, 'Infrastructure will no longer be a slush fund for the Liberal and National parties to rort', or, 'we can't appoint our own National Party mates to Infrastructure Australia anymore when this bill goes through.'

Infrastructure Australia was a terrific initiative of the now Prime Minister when he was infrastructure minister under Prime Minister Rudd. It was set up to provide expert advice to the Australian government on infrastructure investment. It was a great initiative to ensure that scarce taxpayer dollars are directed transparently to the projects of greatest national impact with independent assessments of things getting into the pipeline and of the benefits of the costs, and to provide that advice to the Australian government and the states and territories. They should be projects of genuine national significance, but, since then, in the wasted decade when those opposite were in government, in the ATM government—the Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison government—throwing the cash around like the ATM—

Thank you, member for Fisher. I'm glad you appreciate that one. But since then, in that wasted decade, Infrastructure Australia has lost its way. They were sidelined, they were stretched too far, they lacked focus, they became a plaything for the National Party because apparently when the coalition, the Liberals and Nationals, are in government there is a God-given birthright to give the infrastructure portfolio to the National Party to treat as one giant piggy bank—a slush fund—to throw money around at whatever project comes up in a National Party seat, regardless of the cost benefit.

A government member: Shame.

It is a shame. It is a matter to be ashamed of. Billions of dollars of taxpayer funds were—I'm not allowed to say 'puked up against a wall'—wasted on projects that just did not stack up. They were not the highest priority.

This bill amends Infrastructure Australia's legislation to ensure that it advises the government and actually assesses projects of national significance. The changes respond to an independent review by Nicole Lockwood and Mike Mrdak, AO, former secretary of the department. They'll provide greater alignment between Infrastructure Australia's work program and advice to government, which needs to make informed investment decisions, not just make stuff up and announce stuff by press release.

I haven't had time to go back over and reassemble the figures. It would have been nice, wouldn't it? I sat through question time after question time as the previous government—then Prime Minister Morrison, then Treasurer Frydenberg and the whole sad lot of them—kept announcing things. But then we'd get to the end of the financial year and they wouldn't actually build what they announced. The whole point of infrastructure, apparently, was to issue press releases and say what you were going to do but never actually do it.

Under this government, Infrastructure Australia's focus will continue to be on transport, water, energy and communications infrastructure to connect cities and regions and grow the economy, supporting the conditions for economic growth. There is a new slimmed down, modern governance model which provides for Infrastructure Australia to have three expert commissioners with the eminence, authority and standing to restore its position as a national leader in infrastructure. Another trigger warning: the commissioners will be appointed through a merit based process. They won't be mates of Barnaby Joyce, as the previous board was stacked with. It will be a merit based process, an independent recruitment process where the people appointed measure up against the job description. Membership of the National Party is not one of the qualifications to get the job.

I also just want to respond to some of the comments made in the debate by those opposite that were utterly hysterical nonsense about a review which is now underway, an independent review of the Infrastructure Australia pipeline to support the refocusing of this critical national organisation. The minister's commissioned that review. It'll happens over the next couple of months. Infrastructure Australia should be focused on genuinely nationally significant projects, not every little idea that every local council has, every state and territory government has or every National Party MP has—the conga line of rorters bringing their ideas into the minister's office that was their government.

Under the Liberals and Nationals, the 150 priority projects grew to more than 800 projects. The list grew by nearly 500 supposedly priority national projects. Five hundred of them were under $50 million. They are not nationally transformative. They're not going to connect our ports to the rail network and grow the productivity of the country. Eighty-one per cent of them were in Liberal and National Party seats. That was just a coincidence, of course! Apparently congestion doesn't happen in Labor seats. It doesn't happen in the cities. They stacked the pipeline, using taxpayer money, with their mates appointed to the board to create this fake pipeline of fake projects that they knew were never going to get built. The whole point of listing them as a priority was to try and fool communities and voters into thinking that somehow putting out a press release saying that you'd developed a new priority project meant anything. It didn't mean anything. It was hundreds of billions of dollars for projects that were never going to get built.

But worse than that is that it was not just repainting bus lanes, as it was for some of them. Apparently repainting bus lanes was a national infrastructure priority. But it's worse than just the fooling and misleading and the corruption of public administration in the process. It actually generated tens of millions of dollars of actual waste. That's because they created this industry of highly paid consultants, firms and lobbyists, wasting millions of dollars of ratepayers' money from councils and tens of millions of dollars of state government money with the states and territories paying these consultants, lobbyists, designers, advocates and economists to create these business cases. Apparently the whole game was to somehow get on the Infrastructure Australia priority list of now 800 projects. Eight hundred projects cannot possibly be a Commonwealth listed priority. You can't say, for a country of our size, that you've got 800 national priority infrastructure projects. In their quiet moments, they know perfectly well that what we're saying is right, and most of them—not all of them; a few of them are extra dodgy—know that what they did was wrong and that it's not good public administration.

So, we're going to stop that game to get on the list. I'm going to spare the member for Fisher and give someone else a go. I'm not going to go through the rorts of the Urban Congestion Fund, the sports rorts, the regional growth rorts and all the other funds rorted of billions of dollars. I'll just finish with this. On the Urban Congestion Fund—a $4.8 billion slush fund set up by former Prime Minister Morrison, with no guidelines, no transparent process, and literally no-one in the world being asked to apply for this—the bureaucrats still cannot explain why these projects were picked. They were picked by the government. They were picked in the secrecy, the sanctity of the cabinet room. They included—my personal favourite—the set of traffic lights outside Josh Frydenberg's electorate office, in a two-lane road bordered by two narrow suburban side streets. That was a national infrastructure priority under the former government. Then there were the car park rorts throughout the former Treasurer's electorate. Well, that didn't end very well, did it? I think people saw through that.

But my very favourite thing out of the Urban Congestion Fund, if we're talking about Infrastructure Australia, was that, of all those billions of dollars of funds, none of them were referred to Infrastructure Australia for assessment—it was just a slush fund to try to get through an election—except two. Two projects were referred to Infrastructure Australia. Two of them were road projects in the electorate of Aston. And guess what Infrastructure Australia said? They said: 'These do not stack up. These are not national infrastructure priorities.' So, what did they do? They fake-funded them anyway. When I say 'fake-funded', I mean that they committed about one-sixth. They announced about one-sixth of the money that was going to be needed to build the project and put it out in press releases just before the election. They trumpeted it in the by-election. But this time nobody fell for the con trick, because I think Australians woke up to this mob. It was a fake government led by a fake prime minister. Everything was about the announcement, never about the delivery.

This fake pipeline of 800 national priority infrastructure projects illustrates the point. We are getting on with cleaning up their mess.

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