Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wide Bay for the motion. I note that he says that the responsibility and blame rest with successive governments—a concession he didn't make, by the way, in his motion. I acknowledge his background as a police officer and crash investigator and his longstanding interest in and commitment to road safety.

Accidents that occur on our National Highway, the Bruce Highway—the Bruce, as the member for Moreton and other Queenslanders call it—in recent weeks are tragedies, and our thoughts are with the families and loved ones of those impacted and with the Queensland police and other emergency service personnel who attend these crashes. Every death on a road is one too many. However, the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads' own safety data shows that the Bruce Highway is getting safer as upgrades are completed, and the rate of fatality or serious crashes per 100 kilometres travelled dropped from 14.7 to 11.2 recently.

We all want to see more and better road safety on the Bruce. It's absolutely vital for Queensland, and it takes the collective efforts of every level of government to reduce the road toll. I can assure the member for Wide Bay that the Albanese government is working closely with the Queensland government. The Prime Minister has spoken to the Premier about this, and the minister for infrastructure and member for Ballarat, Catherine King, has asked the responsible minister in the Queensland government, Bart Mellish, to bring forward projects. The Queensland government needs to know. It needs to step up in relation to safety projects and safety works. Future priorities are critical. We need to hear from the Queensland government in relation to that. It needs to identify what the priority projects are and work with local government to get support.

I'm chair of the Queensland Black Spot Consultative Panel, and I know that road safety is a high priority for the Albanese government. We're working to make improvements. We're investing record amounts of money into the Bruce Highway, with $10 billion for the highway as part of our more than $20 billion contribution to infrastructure in Queensland, including $1.35 billion for the Bruce Highway Safety Package. In the last budget, we invested $467 million into the Bruce Highway, including an additional $154 million for improvements along the northern corridor of the Bruce Highway.

This builds on our record during the previous federal Labor government, when we boosted investment in the Bruce Highway to $7.6 billion in six years, compared to only $1.3 billion over the 11 years of the Howard government. We are also accelerating projects along the highway. We recently finished the Cooroy to Curra Bruce Highway upgrade in the member for Wide Bay's own electorate. This was something that started under the Rudd government but was left to languish for a long time under the coalition. We got shovel-ready, and then they wanted to down tools. To the member's credit—and I'll give him credit—he convinced his coalition government colleagues at the time to speed up the delivery of the project, and now it's finally been completed.

The Albanese government takes road safety very seriously. It's a top priority to improve regional roads. We've backed this in with a record amount of funding for the Black Spots Program and $200 million for the new Safer Local Roads and Infrastructure Program. We've doubled the Roads to Recovery funding from $500 million to  $1 billion per year on top of the bilateral funding that we're delivering. In addition, we've created the new National Road Safety Action Plan Grants Program, providing grant funding to program initiatives that assist in delivering our commitment to Vision Zero. We're working with sets and territories to develop a shared set of nationally consistent road safety data and recently finalised the intergovernmental road safety data sharing agreement.

The motion calls on the government to restore the former government's 80 per cent funding share of projects for the Bruce Highway. What beggars belief here is that we're not actually reducing funding; we're just calling on the states and territories to increase their share of funding consistent with last year's independent review of the infrastructure investment program. So it's a bit disingenuous for those opposite to claim we're reducing funding, particularly as they had an appalling record on infrastructure delivery with more press releases rather than roads getting rolled out. In addition, we've given more than six times the funding of the previous Howard government on the Bruce Highway. So returning to a 50-50 funding split was recommended last year by the review.

I'll give you an illustration of that in my own electorate. If we had have adopted the 80-20 model, when it came to the Warrego Highway and the alternative upgrade to the Mount Crosby interchange on the Warrego Highway in Ipswich, instead of getting $138.5 million from the Queensland government, we would have only gotten $35 million— (Time expired)

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