Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises the parlous state of Western Australia's finances, brought on by the economic mismanagement of the Western Australian Government and a record low share of GST revenue, which was foreseeable;

(2) acknowledges the importance of Commonwealth infrastructure funding and state infrastructure spending for creating employment and driving economic growth;

(3) notes that $1.54 billion of Commonwealth infrastructure funding has been allocated to the Perth Freight Link (PFL) and Oakajee Port over the forward estimates, in circumstances where:

(a) the Western Australian Government has not committed to stage two of the PFL, a contract for which will be required before Commonwealth funding flows to Western Australia, and the Western Australian Opposition is opposed to the project; and

(b) the Turnbull Government has kept a $339 million allocation to Oakajee Port in the federal budget for more than two years after the project was abandoned;

(4) notes that although Western Australia takes up one third of Australia's land mass and holds 10.4 per cent of the population, the loss of Commonwealth funding for the PFL and Oakajee would cause Western Australia's share of the Commonwealth infrastructure budget to drop to just 9.5 per cent; and

(5) calls on the Australian Government to redirect funding allocated to the PFL to the infrastructure projects that Western Australians actually want and need—the Armadale/North Lake Road Bridge, an Outer Harbour and METRONET.

In Western Australia, people are being confronted by something that here in Canberra we have known for a long time: the harsh reality that, when it comes to economic management, the Liberals cannot be trusted with the finances of government.

The Western Australian Liberal government under Colin Barnett inherited a $1.85 billion surplus, state debt at just $3.6 billion and a 2.7 per cent unemployment rate. In 2012, the peak of the mining construction boom, Western Australia faced net interstate migration of 11,500, while New South Wales was losing 17,000 people. Infrastructure Australia has reported that by 2031, Perth will have seven of the country's top 10 congested roads.

The Barnett Liberals have floated many ideas over the years to address WA's burgeoning infrastructure needs, like a new railway to Ellenbrook, an extension of the Thornlie line to connect to Cockburn Central, MAX Light Rail and a railway tunnel to Morley. But always they failed to deliver and, to make matters worse, they have trashed the state's finances along the way. State debt will hit $31 billion this year. WA recorded a $2 billion deficit last year, and unemployment has now reached 6.3 per cent. All of these issues have been exacerbated by WA's miniscule share of GST distribution. I will talk about that particular issue another time, but these issues have been known for a long time and were even acknowledged in many state budgets.

Among all of this, though, the Abbott-Turnbull-Joyce Liberal-National government are not without blame. Over their three years in government, the federal Liberals have neglected Western Australia's infrastructure needs. Instead of committing to Western Australia's future infrastructure needs, they have instead just rebadged Labor's previous commitments, like the Swan Valley bypass, now the NorthLink WA project. Or they have blatantly taken credit for Labor's projects, like Gateway WA, which the member for Warringah took delight in opening during the Canning by-election, despite it not yet actually being finished. Then there is the commitment to the duplication of Armadale Road, only made to match a commitment by Labor. It is a project that the government was dragged kicking and screaming into, in an attempt not just to secure victory in the Canning by-election but also to save Tony Abbott's prime ministership—I suppose one out of two ain't bad!

However, they did not get this right, as the government has failed the people of Burt, and Fremantle in particular, first by ignoring the requirement to also build a new bridge crossing at the freeway for Armadale Road to complement the Armadale Road duplication.

Then, of course, we have the Perth Freight Link. The state government has signed stage 1 contracts, and yet the federal government has made clear that its funding for the project will not be delivered unless stage 2 is signed as well. Yet, the state government has said it is unlikely to even have a route for stage 2 before the 2017 state election. WA Labor opposes the project in its entirety, as a white elephant, and no-one has seen a business case for the project that demonstrates that it will deliver any value to Western Australia. But it does not stop there: this government is still budgeting $339 million for an equity stake on the Oakajee Port project—a project that has been effectively mothballed. It appears that we have two projects for which federal funds will not actually be forthcoming, meaning that WA's share of infrastructure spend will drop to just 9.5 per cent, from 2015 to 2019, of all federal infrastructure spending.

So Western Australia—a state that takes up a third of the country's land mass, has more than 10 per cent of the nation's population and, in 2015, accounted for more than 40 per cent of Australia's goods exported by value—is not only not receiving its fair share of the GST; it is also not receiving a fair share of infrastructure dollars. Instead of spending $1.2 billion bulldozing the Beeliar Wetlands to build WA's only toll road—which does not even reach its destination—or continuing to hold out over $300 million for a port that will not be built, think about what great projects WA could build to ensure its economy can continue to grow and provide employment post the mining and construction boom, if the Turnbull Liberals redirected these funds to useful projects. These could include the sorely needed new Armadale Road bridge; a new third lane heading north on Kwinana Freeway at Cockburn Central; the Thornlie line extension connecting Canning Vale to Cockburn Central; planning for a new Fremantle outer harbour; or fixing the notoriously dangerous Denny Avenue level crossing in Kelmscott.

The Commonwealth government has a responsibility to provide a fair and equitable distribution of funds across the states, including for infrastructure. This is necessary to drive economic growth, remove bottlenecks, create jobs and to meet the needs of all Australians. In this regard, the Turnbull and Barnett Liberal governments have utterly and fundamentally failed the people of Western Australia.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

Ben Morton (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a delight to have the opportunity to speak on economic management and infrastructure—even more so in the context of the great state of Western Australia; a state made great by the hard work of Colin Barnett and his Liberal team. Liberal governments make decisions and they get things done, and nothing is truer for Colin Barnett and his Liberal government.

In 2008, the people of Western Australia could not recall three things that the then Labor government had achieved, because they were all talk and no action. When people go to vote at the March 2017 state election, they will be in no doubt about the things that Colin Barnett and his government have done and are doing to support economic growth and jobs.

All we have seen from Labor is opposition for opposition's sake and a constant handbrake on getting things done and built. Let me run through a few things in WA that Labor are against and, if they were elected, would not have happened: the new Perth Stadium, the new museum, uranium mining, Elizabeth Quay and Perth City Link. Infrastructure spending creates employment and drives growth. Tens of thousands of jobs, direct and indirect, would not have existed, if Labor had their way. What a sad, pathetic position for the Labor Party to find themselves in. The Labor Party is anti-WA jobs.

We should not be surprised: we cannot forget that WA Labor leader Mark McGowan was the most ineffective education minister WA has ever seen. He oversaw the biggest teacher shortages in our state's history. Anti-infrastructure, anti-economic development and anti-jobs—that is WA Labor. And what project is most at risk by Labor? The Perth Freight Link. This project is essential for my community and for Western Australia. I support the Roe 8 project and I support the Fremantle bypass tunnel, a tunnel that is needed to take that traffic from Stock Road to connect to the Stirling Highway near High Street. Roe 8 and Fremantle Tunnel will bypass 14 sets of traffic lights on Leach Highway and Stock Road, reducing stop-start traffic, crashes and exhaust emissions; and 12.5 minutes will be saved between Fremantle and the Kwinana Freeway.

By 2021, railway will carry in excess of 6,900 trucks and 74,000 light vehicles per day, taking them off Farrington Road, South Street, Leach Highway and other local roads into this dedicated free-flowing highway. The Fremantle Tunnel will carry 4,700 trucks and 40,300 light vehicles, removing traffic congestion and improving safety on local roads. Property values will increase due to improved transport connectivity in the southern suburbs and the removal of heavy freight from local roads. The project will create 2,400 direct jobs and 10,000 indirect jobs.

The member for Burt and the Labor Party want to take funding away from a project that Infrastructure Australia rates as one of only five highest-priority projects nationally yet to begin construction. It is bonkers! Labor wants to make our streets less safe and more congested. The member for Burt wants to move this money to a bridge that the community does not want.

Mr Keogh interjecting—

Not even the people of Armadale want this bridge, member for Burt! If they did want it the member for Burt may have been here a year earlier, rather than being defeated by the member for Canning at the Canning by-election.

What can we say about Labor's plans to make our streets safer and less congested? Nothing: deafening silence. Just like when the people of WA could not nominate any achievements of the past Labor government in WA, they cannot nominate any plans to make our streets safer and less congested. Why? Because Labor does not have any. The federal member for Fremantle should be very worried about the impact of this shocking position on his community. The state Labor candidate for Bicton heads into the state election campaign with a position that will mean more cars and trucks on our local roads. It is shameful.

Today I end by thanking the member for Burt, because in his motion he highlighted the very strong commitment of the federal Liberal Party to Western Australian and to this important project. The federal Liberal government has committed $1.2 million as requested by the Barnett Liberal state government to build both the railway and the Fremantle bypass tunnel. That is what this funding is for. Let me be very clear: these funds cannot, should not and will not be made available for any other purpose.

I look forward to the state government reconfirming the full project so that planning and environmental approval works can commence. I am standing up for my community and my state for jobs, for growth and for what is right.

Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My colleague the member for Burt has this spot on. The Western Australian economy is facing conditions the likes of which we have not seen for a quarter century. The Western Australian government is in a terrible position to respond because it has run up an astounding debt balance without managing to invest in productive infrastructure or to fix capacity constraints. The reality is that WA is experiencing a recession. Unemployment is high. Full-time jobs continue to fall. The sequence is now at 21 months and counting—something we have not seen since the early 1990s. Underemployment is the highest it has ever been since the ABS began keeping that statistic in 1978, and in some parts of Perth unemployment has risen by 60 or 70 per cent since 2013. Not surprisingly, this is happening in areas that already face socioeconomic disadvantage. The great shame is that those circumstances should have been anticipated.

It is a serious failure that work was not done by the Barnett government or the federal coalition to prepare for the inevitable shift in the resource sector in Western Australia. It was always going to occur. It was always going to involve both a fall in commodity prices and a change away from the construction phase of project development. Getting ready for that shift is precisely what good government exists to do in managing the economy. Unfortunately the very reverse has occurred. The Western Australian government has been fast asleep at the wheel. They have run out of steam at the worst possible time. They are coming apart and, to be honest, it is hard to tell sometimes whether they are abandoning ship or fighting for control of the rudder. At the same time they have been alternatively ignored or, in some cases, particularly with the Perth Freight Link, they have been led down the garden path by their federal coalition counterparts.

But the greatest shortcoming of the Barnett government is wasted opportunity. It is astonishing to think that for the first six years of the Barnett government revenue grew strongly, year on year. At the time of the global financial crisis, when the Commonwealth and other states faced a collapse in revenue, the WA government was sitting pretty, relatively speaking. They should have been working to prepare for change. They should have been anticipating a turn in the cycle, especially because Western Australians know that the resources economy has always involved those kinds of twists and turns.

Did they work to ensure strong local content involvement in resources projects? No. Did they recognise the costs in obstacles of congestion, and did they start to develop and implement transport infrastructure that would support jobs and improve productivity? No. Have they prevailed on their supposedly influential federal coalition colleagues to ensure that WA receives a fair share of future shipbuilding work? No. So what is the reality? As the member for Burt's motion details, you have all this Commonwealth infrastructure money parked in projects that are not happening and, in the case of the Perth Freight Link, should never have been proposed in the first place.

Fully $1.54 billion—$1,500 million—is sitting there achieving nothing as WA slides further into recession conditions. It is money that should be holding up demand in the WA economy, that should be supporting construction and manufacturing jobs, that should be addressing the stifling effects of congestion and that should be underwriting economic transition and diversification. Instead, those funds are sitting idle, through complacency, through absence of leadership and through a very strange sense of entitlement, through a weird conviction that somehow the people of Western Australia owe the coalition a living. It is ridiculous.

The economic mismanagement and infrastructure paralysis in WA has three flow-on effects. It means there is no effective response to the employment crisis, which is severe and getting worse. It means that WA continues to be short-changed by the Commonwealth and it means the Barnett government has been forced to cast around for public assets to sell, including Fremantle Port and Western Power, when there is no mandate and no justification for those public assets to be privatised. It means local projects of significance are left on the drawing board.

The member for Burt has already talked about Community Connect South, which provides a solution to crippling congestion at the border of our electorates. The City of Armadale is very much affected by it—I am not sure where the member for Moreton is getting his local community information—and the city of Cockburn, on my side of the freeway, is equally affected. Both those local governments are clear-eyed about the solution, and the member for Burt and I are in no doubt about the change that would have been delivered if a Labor government had been elected with $80 million committed to that project.

It is not good enough, as this motion makes abundantly clear. WA has suffered and continues to suffer from state government neglect on a grand scale. It is neglect that has been aided and abetted by the federal coalition.

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is great to speak on this motion because, all of a sudden, those on the other side of the chamber have become economic geniuses. When I arrived in this place, in 2007, there was $20 billion in the bank—and over the six years that Labor were in government they destroyed the Australian economy and increased debt enormously. These guys over here, the Johnny-come-latelies, have turned up and said, 'Let's focus on state issues and not worry about the Commonwealth.' But in part 2 of his—

Mr Josh Wilson interjecting—

I will remind the member for Fremantle that I sat back and listened to everything he said without interjecting once. You can have a crack if you want to, mate; go for it. In Mr Keogh's motion he acknowledges the importance of Commonwealth infrastructure funding and state infrastructure spending for creating employment and driving economic growth. It is good he acknowledges that, because I will remind him of what the coalition government is investing not only in Australia as a whole but also in Western Australia.

There is a $50 billion spend to get vital infrastructure projects underway across the country. In Western Australia alone we are investing $6.3 billion of productivity-enhancing infrastructure, delivering on our economic action plan to boost economic growth and prosperity and create thousands of new jobs. The Turnbull government has provided an additional $490 million towards the construction of the $2 billion Forrestfield-Airport Link project, implementing the government's commitment to maintaining Western Australia's GST relativity at its 2014-15 levels. I also note that in the previous financial year, they also allocated $500 million as compensation for the low GST, which those on the other side seem to forget about—that is $1 billion that has gone into the Western Australian economy through the coalition government.

The coalition government has also secured funding for a number of major projects that Labor promised to fund with the proceeds of the mining tax, and I can talk about Gateway as one in my electorate, which is a major project that has been completed ahead of time under the coalition government. It was to be funded by the mining tax but, unfortunately, the anti-Western Australian mining tax and the carbon tax introduced by those on the other side of this chamber, who conveniently forget about it and always forget about it and never raise it in anything they talk about—and I am sure all Western Australians know that they will bring it back if they ever get back into government—were supposed to be funding the Gateway project. Unfortunately, the money raised could not do that; it could not even pay for the administration of that particular mining tax that they dealt to Western Australia. These, as I said, include the funding of the Gateway project, the NorthLink WA and the Great Northern Highway in the northwest coast; all the highway upgrade projects.

The coalition government is also investing $1.185 billion towards the long overdue Perth Freight Link. The Perth Freight Link will provide a direct, free-flowing connection between the Roe Highway and the port of Fremantle, providing improved capacity for heavy-vehicle freight movements to and from the port. The coalition is also improving safety of local roads by making additional investments in the Roads to Recovery and Black Spot programs. I know up to $2 million extra has been invested in Black Spot programs within my electorate of Swan.

Western Australia will benefit from the government's commitment to extend the Roads to Recovery program to 2019-20 at $400 million per year, the maintenance of $350 million per year for Black Spot programs, $60 million per year for the Bridges Renewal Program, and $60 million per year in the Heavy Vehicle Safety and Productivity Program, which is getting $40 million per year. Also, during the election, due to the advocacy of local coalition MPs during the campaign, the Turnbull government announced over $35 million in funding for a number of additional projects. There was the Woolworths and the Hale Road intersection upgrade, $650,000; the Ocean Reef Road overpass at Wanneroo Road, $20 million; and, in my electorate again, the Manning Road on-ramp, $15 million. The coalition government is building Western Australia's future by delivering the biggest infrastructure investment program in Australian history. The Swan Valley bypass involves construction of a 37-kilometre highway from the Reid Highway and Tonkin Highway intersection in Malaga to the Great Northern Highway at Muchea, including upgrades to connecting roads and interchanges within the existing road network.

What we see here today is a frontline event or campaign in progress for the next state election, which Mark McGowan has set these blokes up to do and embarrass themselves in the federal parliament.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.