Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will speak fairly briefly on the Nation Building Program (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2009. The bill before us today is one that the Australian Greens will be supporting for many of the reasons that Senator Macdonald has outlined. The amendments, by and large, are sensible. They are tying up a number of administrative loose ends and rolling the funding, formerly known as AusLink funding, into the government’s Nation Building Program. The Australian Greens will be supporting these amendments. The Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government said in his second reading speech:

This bill is central to the effective delivery of the government’s road and rail infrastructure investment through the Nation Building Program—a program currently worth more than $26 billion.

The emphasis is on ‘currently worth’ because obviously this funding commitment will need to be ongoing. As the financial crisis unfolds around us, presumably the government will be looking to future infrastructure spending.

There is an enormous amount of funding on the table and, in the context of the announcements that we received on budget night, last month, this is the first Commonwealth funding for public transport in probably 15 years. It is the first time in quite a while—since the Better Cities Program was closed down in 1996—that we are seeing the Commonwealth getting back into urban public transport, including urban rail. Some of those announcements are quite welcome. I suspect that there is a bit more to them than meets the eye, but at least we have more than in-principle support from the Commonwealth that it is not just in the business of roads. Thank goodness there are now some substantive investments in urban public transport. The most significant of these investments is the Gold Coast light rail project and, from a funding point of view, it is the rail project to the west of Melbourne. These investments are very welcome.

At the same time that we are seeing funding shift in a tentative way—but in a way that I hope signals a greater shift in the future—into public transport, we are also seeing the first robust and substantive scrutiny of large-scale infrastructure spending through Infrastructure Australia. It is not a perfect process, but one thing which is welcome is that at least Infrastructure Australia’s short list and the minister’s funding announcements were made public. We are now in a position to see how different the minister’s and the government’s final spending decisions were from what the expert panel identified. It is obviously a process that has still got quite a way to go, but at least we are seeing the beginning of some public accountability in the way that very large tranches of funding will be spent on critical infrastructure.

At this point, I say to Senator Macdonald that the Australian Greens will be supporting the second reading amendment circulated by the opposition. In the event that we come to a vote, I think the amendment is entirely sensible; it is basically a safeguard to the fact that we will have to take it on face value that the government does not propose that its bill will be a way of draining road funding out of regional areas where road transport funding can often be a matter of life and death, particularly where the Black Spot Program is concerned. We think the amendment is sensible and we will be supporting it.

I want to speak briefly to the amendment that I will be moving in the committee stage, which I should foreshadow with an apology for the late circulation. I know members of the opposition are still giving that amendment some consideration. I will also foreshadow for the minister’s benefit a question I will be asking in the committee stage before I move that amendment, which is: exactly who in the Commonwealth government is the lead minister on oil depletion, fossil fuel depletion and oil price shocks? Who is the minister? What is the lead agency? My understanding is that it is in fact Minister Martin Ferguson, but I guess what we are looking for is some statement on exactly how the Commonwealth government is dealing with fossil fuel depletion issues.

There are a range of estimates. These things were canvassed in quite a degree of detail by the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport in years past before my time here. It is a matter that is under active consideration in the public transport inquiry which I initiated late last year. But what I would like to know who the lead agency is and what that agency is up to, because these matters have probably received quite a degree less scrutiny and discussion in the parliament and in the community than the issue of climate change. We are going to spend probably the balance of our time in here in this session debating climate change and I am not sure that there is going to be a great deal of focus on the other pincer of fossil fuel prices that is enveloping industrial societies—and that is peak oil and fossil fuel depletion.

This is not an issue that will be coming 30 years down the track and that governments in four or five elections time will be needing to come to grips with. This is actually something that may well be upon us now. So what I am seeking is information, as detailed as the minister is able to come up with, when we get to the committee stage as to exactly whether or not the Commonwealth government is asleep at the wheel. That might sound like strong language, but I have been finding it very difficult in estimates committee hearings, in questions on notice and in my other work in here and in the community to establish whether or not this country is essentially sleepwalking into peak oil and, if there is another oil shock on a scale of the taste that we received 18 months or so ago before the economy dragged world oil prices back down, exactly what the contingency plans are.

The amendment effectively goes to this in a way that I hope the government and the opposition parties in here will agree is sensitive to the intent of this bill. A lot of the funding that has been disbursed under the act that this bill is amending is around black spots and death traps on the nation’s road network, small-scale maintenance works and road funding that is administered by local government. You will see from the context of this amendment that we are not seeking to interfere with that important work. That is why there are some thresholds there for the amounts of money at which the Greens amendments would come into effect. At the moment we have a situation in which the minister in deciding whether or not to disburse funding under the program formerly known as AusLink may give regard to part 3, section 11 of the act, entitled ‘AusLink national projects’, where it says:

Is it appropriate to approve a project?

There are a number of criteria there which the minister may, if he or she chooses to on any given day, have regard to. But nowhere is there anything at all relating to sensitivity to future energy prices, which would capture carbon price in the medium term, depending on the outcomes of the CPRS later this week or whatever may happen down the track. But perhaps just as importantly, when, not if, Australia is hit by significant rises in the price of oil and gas, we will not be insulated from these shocks because we are now part of world markets.

I suppose the most substantive amendment which I am going to put to the chamber in the committee stage is that the minister must do no more than have regard to sensitivity to future energy price rises of any given development of a value greater than $50 million, which I hope you will agree—and I am happy to have a debate on the threshold amount of money—will not interfere with the sort of urgent work around the nation’s road network on black spots and so on. That is effectively what that amendment does. It does not tie the hands of the minister or put him in any kind of legislative handcuffs. It asks, ‘Have you considered traffic projections? Have you considered whether this piece of infrastructure is going to be obsolete in 20, 10 or two years time, depending on your choice of projections, when oil goes to $200 or $500 a barrel?’ I do not think at this stage—and I would be delighted to be proven wrong—there is any form of assessment at any level in the Commonwealth government that really pays great regard to this. We still have ABARE saying, ‘If the price of eggs is high enough then roosters will lay.’ I suggest that is just as bizarre a comment geologically as it is biologically. I trust the geologists when they talk about future oil stocks rather than the economists. That is what the first substantive amendment here is for.

The second amendment is almost self-evident—that projects with a significantly higher threshold of spending of $200 million or more be brought forward as a disallowable instrument so that parliament can take a look and make sure, as the final act of scrutiny in a long process, this is a worthwhile investment in nation building. These amendments are not intended to be retrospective. As I say, they are not to interfere with the works which I understand the parent act of this bill largely exists to regulate.

Just briefly in closing I would like to acknowledge the constructive way in which the minister and his staff have approached negotiations—albeit very hasty ones, as we were anticipating that this would come on tomorrow. But, nonetheless, I just want to put on the record that I appreciate the way in which the government has approached this discussion so far. I look forward to other contributions and I will speak again briefly to this amendment when we get to the committee stage.