Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister said this would be a budget to help Australians realise their dreams. On Tuesday night, the Treasurer targeted welfare, health and education spending as bad debt but infrastructure as good debt. But where was the infrastructure? Certainly not in Victoria, my home state. Victoria is getting less than 10 per cent of this government's planned infrastructure spend across the forward estimates, although we have 25 per cent of the population. The government is withholding $1.6 billion from the Victorian government, which held up its end of a deal and leased the Port of Melbourne under the Asset Recycling Scheme. Victorians are owed that money. That money was planned to be spent on regional rail, and my electorate would have been a winner under those plans with the regional rail link running through my electorate. This is politics at its absolute worst. We need a calculator for the government—$500 million is not $1.46 billion. Victoria is still owed money by this government. This is going to hurt Victoria. It is going to hurt the development of jobs. It is going to hurt congestion. It is going to stop people from my electorate getting to and from work in the city if that is where they need to be.

The Prime Minister also said budgets are about choices—and of course we all know that they are. We in Victoria are concerned that the budget still contains $50 billion worth of tax cuts. It still contains tax cuts for millionaires, with the deficit levy coming off despite the deficit having tripled and debt being expected to reach half a trillion dollars. Victorians deserve their fair share. They deserve a Prime Minister and a Treasurer who are considering Victorians.

I want to make one last point about the electorate of Lalor. Lalor is in a growth corridor. With over 230,000 people, 6½ thousand housing lots were approved in Wyndham's areas between January and July 2016. If you extrapolate that, how many people are moving into our community? Under the Building Stronger Regions program, magically our community has been cut out. So there is one more way that we could have attracted some federal dollars into our community to help support jobs, to help support infrastructure, to help us get on with living meaningful lives in our electorate. But we have been locked out of the $200 million for Building Better Regions. The people of Wyndham are not happy with this budget and neither am I.