Nicolle Flint (Boothby, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Urban Infrastructure and Cities. Would the minister update the House on how the coalition's Infrastructure Investment Program is helping to drive investment in our urban areas and generate more and better-paid jobs for hardworking Australians? Minister, how is this plan benefiting communities in my electorate of Boothby and across South Australia more broadly?

Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Minister for Urban Infrastructure and Cities) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do thank the member for Boothby, who is a terrific champion for urban infrastructure, including in her electorate. And why wouldn't she be? Thanks to her advocacy, the Oaklands Crossing, a very important project—$174 million; $95 million from the Commonwealth—which had been talked about for decades is, thanks to the member for Boothby, being delivered; in fact, a major contract was awarded in January this year. This is a project which will materially reduce the delays on Morphett Road for the 42,000 vehicles which use that road every day. During peak hours, at the moment, the boom gates are down for 25 per cent of the time, and replacing this with a rail underpass is going to produce terrific productivity benefits and terrific benefits for the people of Adelaide and the people of Boothby. Along with that there is the Flinders Link Project: $43 million from the Turnbull government to connect the Flinders University medical centre to the Adelaide metropolitan rail network.

That is just some of the extraordinary scale of infrastructure investment happening in Adelaide. And the member has been a very strong advocate. One point six billion dollars of Commonwealth money is going into three enormous projects on the north-south corridor, averaging 1,330 jobs a year: $885 million on the northern connector, 80 per cent funded by the Turnbull government; the Darlington project, for $620 million; again, that is 80 per cent funded by the Turnbull government—by the federal coalition.

I'll tell you what: if you had to wait to rely on state Labor to deliver these projects, you'd be waiting a very long time. But, thanks to the Turnbull government, we are delivering in Adelaide, in SA, as part of an infrastructure spend of $9 billion in 2017-18 and $10 billion in 2018-19, and as part of a massive infrastructure spend all around the country. The Deputy Prime Minister has just run through some of the projects, but there is such an enormous list that I can find plenty of others to mention: the M80 Ring Road in Melbourne, the Tullamarine Freeway in Melbourne, NorthLink in Western Australia, the Perth Airport-Forrestfield link, the METRONET project in Perth—$792 million of Commonwealth money—the two projects on the M1 Pacific Motorway in Queensland, and Queensland's Gateway Upgrade North. These are delivering jobs in enormous numbers. Western Sydney Airport will be responsible for 11,000 jobs. At the same time, what does state Labor do in state after state? They cancel projects. They cancelled the East West Link in Victoria and they cancelled the Perth Freight Link in Western Australia, and the member for Grayndler tried to walk away from WestConnex in the 2016 election. (Time expired)