Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Cities and Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Prior to the 2019 election, commuters in the Scullin electorate were promised a new car park at South Morang station. However, once the election was over, the Morrison government quietly dropped the project, no doubt hoping no-one would notice. Last month, Minister Fletcher shamelessly announced that four additional car parks for Melbourne's north from his commuter car park rorts fund would be funded. But each one is an existing Victorian government project already underway. Most egregiously, he announced funding for additional car parking at Epping station in my electorate—a project that's already been completed! And these new car parks are not substitutes for cancelled projects either. Watergardens station is 40 kilometres from South Morang; Sunbury, 50 kilometres away. These stations undoubtedly need additional parking, which is why they were funded under the Victorian government's Car Parks for Commuters Program, but funding already-completed car parks and car parks 50 kilometres away doesn't make up for the Morrison government's comprehensive failures in the administration of the commuter car parks fund.

Australians deserve to get to the bottom of this $660 million rort and the other grants programs the Morrison government has treated as LNP slush funds. We urgently need a real national anticorruption commission, one that operates independently of government and that conducts its own inquiries, to stop these rorts and get to the bottom of who is responsible for each of them.