Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are times in a nation's history when opportunity is heightened. For Australia one of those times is right now. Our current financial environment is ideal for exploring large-scale construction and the opportunities it can create for building our country's future. As a result of free trade agreements and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, agricultural food products are in demand in the Asia-Pacific region. Our competitive advantage is driven by our counterseasonal horticultural products, protein products—red meat and dairy—and mechanised starch products such as cereals.

This potential advantage provides us with an opportunity, but that opportunity only happens if we can actually get those products to the marketplace in a safe and efficient manner. The current annual expenditure in the federal budget is about $434 billion. One-third of that, $154 billion, is spent on social services. Whilst I believe in providing a welfare safety net for vulnerable Australians, I also feel that mutual obligation requirements whereby people give back to society are imperative to the integrity of the system as a whole. This is why I am a strong supporter of programs that get people job ready and transition them from being welfare recipients to being jobseekers.

Of the $434 billion in annual expenditure, only $6 billion is spent on roads and roughly $1 billion is spent on rail. Is it any wonder that roads continue to be an election issue? Given that there is surplus capacity in the labour market in construction as a result of the mining industry moving from the construction stage to the extraction phase, the ability to draw good value from investment in public assets is high. Additionally, the federal government can access long-term finance now at less than two per cent interest, ensuring that investments will return viable yields. Now is exactly the time for the federal government to further expand their building program on key infrastructure, using government bonds to capture the opportunities presented by our new and expanding markets.

With the federal government taking a build-and-ownership model in key infrastructure and receiving dividends from some fuel tax that is already levied it gives us a chance to substantially increase our expenditure from $7 billion annually to the tune of $30 billion annually. Driving infrastructure investment would also result in additional revenue moving state government treasuries forward by giving them greater opportunity to have payroll tax and stamp duty, which thereby would help the state governments deliver health and education services.

I am a strong believer that we also need to look at how we spend our road money and our infrastructure money more efficiently. We learnt some lessons from the recent public administration of some funds in my patch with the development of the Sunraysia Modernisation Project. There was $103 million of federal money partnered with $17 million of money from irrigators. The way we structured this is a lesson on how we should spend public funds. The organisation tasked with delivering this project sat outside in an individual unit. We then had the management, who were significant businesspeople, looking over and questioning everything they spent. When they called for tenders they looked at whether the scope of works could be expanded. We have now been successful in building what we thought was going to be a $160 million project for the cost of $120 million. We have been successful in actually putting in substantial pipework. Water that was on urban channels is now being delivered through irrigation pipes.

My belief is that we could expand this model in the way we administer our public funding for roads and the way we administer our public funding for rail. We could set up specific units to administer those funds and oversee the tenders and have external businesspeople looking over the top and questioning the delivery of those funds. The opportunities we have before us, which are largely as a result of trade minister Andrew Robb's work on the free trade agreements, can only turn into revenue and lift the standard of living of Australians if we build the infrastructure that can take the products we produce from where they are produced to the marketplace. Now is the time to increase capital works on our roads and rails substantially, to the tune of $30 billion annually. I think this would be seen as visionary by the Australian people.