Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to again draw attention to the growing community anger in my electorate of Deakin at the way the Labor Party has turned its back on the people of Melbourne's eastern suburbs in its reckless attempt to destroy the East West Link. Last Saturday morning, supporters of this crucial project gathered in Ringwood to support our Build the Link campaign launch—a campaign to tell Labor that its proposed destruction of this project will hurt the eastern suburbs of Melbourne the most.

I was pleased to join members of the community, along with the members for Aston, La Trobe and Casey, to demonstrate the federal coalition's ongoing $3 billion commitment to the project. As I have said before, Deakin residents just want the East West Link built—no arguments, no evasion, no deception. Not only will the East West Link save communities over three hours of traveling time a week; it will also create 6,500 jobs during the construction phase and will improve the productivity of all Victorian businesses. But these benefits will be destroyed by the actions of the Labor Party as they insist on paying as much as $1.2 billion of taxpayers' money in compensation not to build the road—and this is after the Labor Party said that these contracts were not worth the paper they were written on. We know that was a blatant lie, and so again I say to Dan Andrews, Bill Shorten and the Labor Party: get out of the way. And I say to all Victorian supporters of the project: please visit Build the Link.com.au to sign the petition.