Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to express my grave concern that the new Labor government is about to abolish $5 million of funding which had been budgeted for the Tormore Reserve in my electorate. For those that don't know, Tormore Reserve is in Boronia. It's home to the Boronia Hawks Football Netball Club. It's in the poorest part of my electorate, where there's higher than normal unemployment and where there are, unfortunately, some of the issues associated with lower socioeconomic areas. We are doing everything we can to encourage people to participate in sport as a mechanism to get them off the street, to be engaged in the community and to be mentored by older people. This a great club that does great work, and they deserve a proper pavilion. This is $5 million, which was a budget decision. It wasn't an election commitment of ours; it was a budgeted decision. Yet there has been no action taken by the Labor government to try to do anything to see this through. My deep concern is that the Labor Party is about to scrap this funding.

I'm also concerned that the Labor government is about to scrap the funding for several road projects in my electorate. This is money that has been set aside for years. It is budgeted money and it's going towards projects which have been on the books, in some cases, for decades, and we finally had the money to see these projects through. The state Labor government has stalled on these projects for years now. My concern is that the federal Labor government is now going to use the upcoming budget to scrap the funding of these projects. These are projects such as the Dorset Road extension, which has been on the books for decades, and the duplication of Napoleon Road—a desperately needed duplication in my electorate.

I'm concerned that they may even scrap the $475 million allocated for Rowville Rail. This is, again, a project which has been on the books for decades and is desperately needed. We have almost half a billion dollars allocated for the first instalment—to have rapid public transport through to Rowville—and, again, we're hearing nothing from the federal Labor government and, indeed, nothing from the state Labor government.

We need these projects. Constituents in outer eastern Melbourne, residents in outer eastern Melbourne, deserve to have these projects seen through and delivered. I'm calling on this new Labor government to deliver on those projects, to work with their comrades at the state level—there's an election coming up—and to get these projects done.