Kristy McBain (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian people do deserve better, 100 per cent, and they voted for better in May 2022. What they voted for was transparency and a government focused on doing more than talking—on delivering. We on this side of the House don't need to issue a thousand press releases or say the word 'infrastructure' to actually focus on it. All those opposite did—frequently—were press releases. That's all they still do. I've had the shadow Treasurer, the shadow energy minister and the shadow veterans affairs minister issuing press releases in my electorate that have absolutely nothing to do with Eden-Monaro. I find it interesting that that is still their shtick: press release, press release, radio grab, defer, delay, deny—all of that. In the nine years of your government, you added so much to the infrastructure pipeline, but you forgot that you actually have to do more than just add some projects and do a press release and a 30-second radio grab, because none of those things actually work. None of those things actually get us things in our electorates.

What you did was deny communities what they had come to expect. You said, 'We will deliver you this,' and each and every time what happened was there was not enough money put towards it.

You mishandled transport and infrastructure policy. Communities were left with projects that weren't properly funded. The real benefits to communities were not approved. You left the pipeline clogged with delays and overruns, and nation-building projects didn't go ahead. There were so many projects committed to that you never had enough money to fund them. Communities rightly expected that they were going to get something, and they didn't. But we all know that the infrastructure pipeline was very much clogged with a spreadsheet that was colour coded, and there was no fairness or transparency in it.

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