Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to commend the member for Barker for this very important motion, and also thank him for coming to visit my community in Casey so that he could see and understand firsthand the impact of this pause in the 90-day review that has now been going for more than 130 days. We visited Maroondah Highway and Killara Road in Coldstream, as well as Canterbury Road in Montrose, to speak to residents. I'll talk a little bit about those visits and the impact that it's having on my community in particular.

The Maroondah Highway and Killara Road work was funded by the federal government in 2019. The money was there for the Victorian state Labor government to deliver that project. They had it for over four years. The state Labor government did not get the project started. We've been waiting as a community for four years, and now that anguish has been extended because we are on an indefinite wait for this project. This is a dangerous road, a dangerous intersection that needs lights.

The Coldstream CFA, the Gruyere CFA have been calling for this upgrade because their stations are on this road and they get blocked in. They cannot get out to save people when every second counts in an emergency. They have called for this road to be upgraded. The money was there. State Labor and now federal Labor are stopping this project. My state colleague Bridget Vallance and I will be having a community forum next week, on Tuesday 24 October, to again talk to residents because they are frustrated and they are angry that this project continues to be delayed and there is no certainty for them. We will continue to fight and hold this government to account for their broken promises.

And it is a broken promise, because the then opposition leader, now Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in his campaign launch speech, his big statement on what he was going to do, said:

… We will invest in infrastructure to boost productivity and create jobs.

We'll improve regional roads and major highways.

We can put that down as another broken promise from this Prime Minister, and they're starting to gain rapidly in numbers, because they're not investing in infrastructure. It is on pause. It has significant impacts for the Coldstream, Yarra Glen, Healesville and Gruyere communities, and many others, but it also has impacts on people and on their livelihoods.

I was at the Wandin Silvan Field Day this weekend, speaking to many locals. I spoke to a young man called Tim, who runs his own earthmoving business. We were having a great chat about a variety of things, and he was telling me about his business and his work. I said, 'How have things been?' He said: 'For the first time ever, it's slowing down. With all these infrastructure projects being put on hold, I'm not sure how much more work I'm going to have.' That is the impact of this government's decisions. When you delay infrastructure from 90 days out to 130, it costs people jobs, it creates uncertainty for them, and it is disgraceful that this minister continues to drag her feet. But she does have money for the Suburban Rail Loop! There's $2.2 billion for the Suburban Rail Loop.

Let's go back to the Prime Minister's speech. That was a Labor promise, so they're going to honour that—conveniently. There's another broken promise from the Prime Minister:

Labor will put the focus back on nation-building infrastructure using the Infrastructure Australia model I created as Minister.

That was the Prime Minister in his campaign launch. Guess what? The Suburban Rail Loop did not go through Infrastructure Australia, so this Prime Minister has broken another promise to the Australian people—$2.2 billion dollars as a down payment and tens of billions to go, with a statement that does not stack up for the people of Victoria, and certainly not for the people of Casey. He is pulling money out of the Killara Road out of Coldstream. The Canterbury Road upgrade is vital for the Montrose community and, importantly, for the families that that live in the Yarra Valley—the upper Yarra—because they use Canterbury Road as a way to get home quickly. That duplication, removing that roundabout and adding traffic lights was going to improve safety and—really importantly—allow businesses to be more productive and allow people to get home quickly to their families.

These are just a couple of examples of this government continuing to break promises, failing to deliver for the communities of Casey, for Victoria and for the nation. We are seeing an out-of-touch Prime Minister and it is costing Australians every day.

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