Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Infrastructure. The previous government allocated 83 per cent of its Urban Congestion Fund to Liberal- and National-held electorates. Is congestion an issue only in seats that vote for the Liberals? How is the Albanese government doing things differently?

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The members on my left will cease interjecting before the minister even gives an answer.

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Bruce for his question and commend him on the great work he is doing in this space. Last week we had hearings into the previous government's Urban Congestion Fund. When it comes to mismanagement of infrastructure investment, the Urban Congestion Fund, including the now infamous commuter car parks fund, are up there with the worst of the worst. This was a $48 billion fund that allocated 83 per cent of its funding to Liberal-held seats.

I know those opposite like to say they should get all the regional funding, because they try and claim they've got all the regional seats; now they're saying they've got all the city seats as well—all the city seats they hold! Of course, it was meant to be a fund that targeted congestion across cities, across the whole of the country, but 136 of the announced projects were all in Liberal-held seats, with only 26 in Labor-held seats. If you look at those figures, you would think that Australia's most congested roads are only located in those seats that vote for the Liberal Party. Well, really? There's no congestion in the west of Melbourne. Ipswich and Logan are a haven for traffic-free roads. We've got Parramatta and Blacktown and Punchbowl and Cabramatta—a 10-minute commute from there, apparently. As if! Really! No matter where Australians live or who Australians vote for, they deserve to have their projects assessed on merit. This fund was, frankly, nothing short of a mammoth slush fund ready to be pulled out to prop up the election prospects of the Liberal Party. That is not what infrastructure investment is for. It's why our government has been working its way through, trying to clean up the mess left by those opposite.

Not only did they actually politically target this investment; we've also seen that it has been massively underfunded. We've seen that particularly in the seat of Aston: three projects, $50 million to upgrade Napoleon Road, $50 million to Dorset Road and $110 million to Wellington Road. But the problem was, to actually deliver those projects, it was $1.3 billion to build those projects.

I see the Leader of the Opposition is going around saying, 'That was just the way it's profiled; it's always done like that'—that the money is somehow there, as though there's this magical ATM in the sky. You've left a $1 billion hole because of underfunding of these three projects alone. Not only have you left us with a trillion dollars of Liberal Party debt; you've left us with project after project after project, including in the seat of Aston, that you never intended to deliver, that simply cannot be funded because the money is not there, unless you pull it from the magical ATM in the sky that the former Assistant Treasurer somehow thinks is there, available for us all.