Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on a matter of infrastructure—road funding. Specifically, it is 101 days since I wrote to Minister Truss seeking urgent restoration of the funding that his government has taken away from a road funding project in my electorate—Halletts Way—and rolled into the now defunct East West Link. The Halletts Way project is an element of Victoria's Western Highway upgrade, specifically it is part of the final works that were committed as part of the Anthony's Cutting bypass. Work was expected to begin over a year ago.

The project, while it is important, is not one that you would expect to be particularly unusual. It involves the addition of freeway on and off ramps at the side of a two-lane bridge crossing the Western Freeway between Bacchus March and Darley in my electorate. It was devised as part of an effort to increase safety at a busy road between residential areas, and at the same time to improve traffic flow through local bottlenecks that had been exacerbated following the Anthony's Cutting project. What makes this project utterly extraordinary is what has happened to its funding.

In 2012 during the completion of the Anthony's Cutting project, as a result of community requests, lobbying from the local council and changed traffic conditions in Bacchus Marsh, I lobbied the then minister for infrastructure for the remaining funding from Anthony's Cutting to be allocated to the Halletts Way upgrade. Funding was duly earmarked for the project. Funding for the project was announced and, despite some of the budgetary pressures we faced in government, the funding was retained even after the project did not commence.

During 2014 planning should have been completed. The local council was receiving assurances from the state Liberal government that everything was proceeding as planned and that the Halletts Way funding would proceed and the federal funding was secure. I was receiving those assurances from the council. Letters, however, from the Deputy Prime Minister's office reveal an altogether different story.

By the beginning of 2014 negotiations were evidently underway for that funding to be taken away. Warren Truss referred to it as a 'reallocation'. The minister himself confirmed in his letter of 13 June 2013 to the Victorian minister for transport that the Victorian Liberal state government actually asked for the money to be reallocated. I am not the longest-serving member of this place, but I have been fortunate enough to be here for 15 years and it is very unusual for a state government to seek funding for a project that it is still advocating for to be reallocated to another project and then pretend that somehow or other the money can be spent twice. But that is what the state Liberals did.

Where did the funding go? The minister helpfully outlines in his letter to me, and subsequent Senate estimates show, that the funding was rolled into the Liberals' East West Link project. Of course, we now know from the Australian National Audit Office that, against the advice of its own department, an advance payment was made of some $1.5 billion to the Victorian Liberal government for this project. Simply what had happened was that some of the money—that $1.5 billion—was actually taken away at the request of the Victorian Liberals from this road project in my electorate.

Now we want the money back. Despite the minister's rhetoric around the East West Link—'You are never going to get the money'—Victoria has some hope of being able to reallocate this money within Victoria. We want the money back in my community for Halletts Way. I wrote to the minister back in October last year—it is now 101 days—seeking a commitment to have this funding committed back to the project. It should have started by now. It was committed under a previous Labor government. We announced the funding. We were working with the local council to ensure that the Victorian state government planning work was done by VicRoads. All of that was underway. Assurances were given that that would be the case, yet here we had the Liberal state government asking for the government to take that money away and reallocate it.

We now have a situation where the money is there. I want Minister Truss as a matter of urgency and respect to the community of Bacchus Marsh and Darley to restore this money for this project. This community has had millions of dollars cut out of it by this government and it deserves to have that funding. It has particularly difficult circumstances with its road transport at the moment. I call on the minister to reply to my letter and have the decency to return this funding to the Bacchus Marsh and Darley communities.