Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Cities and the Built Environment. Will the minister inform the House how the Gold Coast light rail project will better connect cities in South-East Queensland? How will the government's commitment to evaluating all transport modes when funding infrastructure ensure our cities remain key economic and social assets?

Mr Albanese interjecting—

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Grayndler, I remind him, has already been warned.

Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Cities and the Built Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for the question and his commitment to his part of the world, along with the members for Moncrieff, Fadden and Macpherson, who argued so strongly for investment from the federal government in this project. It is an important project, and it is part of an approach the Prime Minister is leading on making Australian cities the best that they can be and to ensure that we have livable, accessible and productive cities to attract the world's best global talent. Clearly the investment on the Gold Coast light rail, the second stage of which will connect the first stage with the Brisbane rail connections, will make that protect itself work very well for the future of the Gold Coast and its growth, but also for the Commonwealth Games. Members on this side are, of course, very committed to ensuring that the Commonwealth Games are a success in 2018, with key infrastructure investments to ensure that they go off as well as we want them to in the international sphere.

This new portfolio is very much focused on the future. It is about jobs. It is about ensuring people in our cities have access to the best possible housing as close to the jobs as possible. We know that in recent decades jobs have centralised while our cities have expanded. That has made the challenge of living in our cities even harder than it once was, and getting access to good quality housing has been more challenging. So the Treasurer, the Minister for Social Services and I will be working very hard to find ways to make housing more accessible throughout our country, throughout our major cities, and we will be working on ways to fund and innovate, using our balance sheet, to deliver more mass transit projects. The minister for major projects and I focus very much on how we can get more private-sector capital invested into these major projects to ensure the future of our cities is sustainable and that they are livable, they are accessible and they are productive for Australia's future.

We know Australia is a very urbanised country—much more so than many of our competitors. Even though we are a wide brown land, we are locked up largely in our major cities. The large bulk of our GDP is derived from those cities, with 24 per cent of our GDP coming exclusively from Sydney, so we are focused on what we can do as a federal government to coordinate with state and local governments to complement their efforts and ensure that we have cities which work well for our future, which are creating jobs and providing the growth that we need for a stronger Australia. It is an exciting futurist portfolio that the Prime Minister is very focused on and that this government is focused on. It will be making the most of our investments; it will be ensuring we get the cities we need to attract the best global talent and make Australia stronger.