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

Senator Conroy probably could have used another 10 minutes; he was just getting on a roll. I am very pleased to be speaking on this bill today. The Senate is debating a bill that will ultimately impact upon every single one of us, whether we live in cities or towns; whether we expect a high standard of service delivery in energy, transport, water and telecommunications; or whether we've long since given up hope. Despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of Australians will probably ever know that this bill is even up for debate, the way this vote plays out will have consequences far beyond this chamber.

Before I get into the detail of the bill the government has presented us with, I want to take a step back and ask what the government means when it talks about infrastructure. In the course of this debate that word is going to get thrown around a lot and, as usual, will be made to sound tedious, technocratic and politically neutral. To most of us infrastructure is invisible by design—the mesh of ducts and pipes unseen beneath city streets, or hidden in plain sight like the electricity distribution grid, so ubiquitous that we no longer even see it. In the industrialised world, this ubiquity and reliability means that infrastructure is unspoken, is taken for granted and is basically extremely boring—until the moment it breaks. At the point that the server goes down, or the water main blows a hole in the street, or the big one—the moment when the electricity grid goes dark without warning and winds the clock back a century—infrastructure suddenly becomes very visible, and overwhelmingly interesting, life or death interesting.

These inconceivably complex overlays of tarmac, glass fibre and pipework are in important ways the very definition of what it means to be an urban, and urbanising, species. In the industrialising world, they are not in the least taken for granted: supplies of fresh water and electricity to the vast informal settlements on the periphery of the great cities of the global south range from intermittent or improvised to completely out of reach. Secure and affordable housing is perhaps the most intimate form of infrastructure. Its degree of connectivity to the extended circulatory systems of power, water, transport and telecommunications is used the world over as shorthand for degrees of modernity and civilisation.

In this most abundantly wealthy of nations, what are we to make of the knowledge that there are Aboriginal communities in the Western Desert in which no new houses can be built to relieve chronic overcrowding, even though there is funding available for it, because the obsolete electricity generators are too underpowered to handle any increase in the load? Should we query why inner urban communities share close proximity to public transport, fast telecommunications and health and education services while outer metropolitan and regional communities struggle to maintain even basic standards of service provision?

Infrastructure in Australia, as anywhere else, is deeply political. It involves tens of billions of dollars in construction and maintenance contracts; monopoly rents from power plants and other utilities; freight rail lines that swing right by your coal mine or light rail lines that run past your shopping centre; and, slowly but surely, expanding citywide traffic jams that are gradually paralysing whole communities. This unsustainable traffic congestion is exploited with private toll roads and closing alternative routes, as has happened here in Australia. Infrastructure is political. The politics of infrastructure is the difference between a train that arrives every four minutes and a bus that arrives every four hours. It is the difference between ready proximity to services, schools and hospitals, or being stranded over the horizon, far from friends, family and a job. And it is the difference between infrastructure provision for the widest public benefit versus narrow private interests.

What are we to make of the bill that the government lands on us today? The bill proposes reforms to Infrastructure Australia to give effect to the Prime Minister's pre-election commitment to abolish Commonwealth funding to every public transport project in the country. There will be no public transport under a government I lead, the Prime Minister has effectively declared—and it is one of the few pre-election commitments he has decided to keep. It has killed the Brisbane Cross River Rail project. It has stalled the pre-feasibility work that was going into the Melbourne Metro, and we can kiss goodbye any expansions to Sydney's commuter rail network. It ripped half a billion dollars out of the Perth light rail project, giving the Barnett government the excuse it needed to delay the project by five years or more. The east coast high-speed rail studies will presumably now get shelved to collect dust with all the other high-speed rail studies. That means talented planning and project teams are walking out of the door right around the country at the stroke of a pen, killing projects that our suburbs and regional communities desperately need.

I think it is fair to say that this Prime Minister has something of a freeway fetish. In April 2013, from opposition, he took a doorstop in Frankston and said this:

Now the Commonwealth government has a long history of funding roads. We have no history of funding urban rail and I think it's important that we stick to our knitting, and the Commonwealth's knitting when it comes to funding infrastructure is roads.

Knitting—how quaint! Commonwealth infrastructure policy described by using interpretive handcraft metaphors. It gets better. This is from January 2013, again from opposition:

Better roads mean better communities…

The then opposition leader said:

They're good for our physical and mental health. They're even good for our environment because cars that are moving spew out far less pollution than those that are standing still.

So there you have it. National mental health policy just needed a good solid concrete pour for a new urban freeway.

To give legislative effect to this embarrassing and counterproductive delusion, the government had proposed to gut the independence of the Commonwealth's only, and certainly most authoritative, infrastructure advisory body—Infrastructure Australia. The original proposal was to allow ministers to be able to compel Infrastructure Australia to assess particular pet projects. The government also wanted to be able to preclude IA from assessing whole categories of projects, to prevent them from spreading their seditious opinions on the public benefits of cycling infrastructure or public transport. We could refer to it as the 'stick to your knitting' amendment.

Keep in mind that Infrastructure Australia's processes are not determinative. This is an advisory body we are talking about. All it does is evaluate the projects that states and territories put forward to it and assemble them into a national priority list—prioritising projects it believes offer the best value for the Commonwealth's scarce capital. IA's processes are not perfect and, when we get to the committee stage, I will go into more detail about my strong concerns about how cost-benefit analysis factors are used and abused to artificially inflate the value of some projects and kill off others. The main thing to keep in mind is that IA processes are an attempt to assess infrastructure funding without politicians in the room demanding that marginal seats should all get concrete poured on them. The final decision about which projects actually get funded rests with the executive.

Exhibit A of this quite important fact—that IA is no more or less than an expert advisory body—is the Commonwealth's postelection infrastructure commitments and determinations. None of them come from IA's priority list, and the spending favours seats held by—guess what—members of the Abbot government, Liberal and National seats, by three to one. What a remarkable coincidence—75 per cent or more. How about that? That is why you need independence. That is why you need an expert in the room to keep the politicians and the politics at arm's length—which is not what we are getting. It also underlines the fact that, no matter what this chamber does with this bill and no matter how much surgery we perform to improve it and send it back to the House of Representatives, the Abbott executive is still entirely free to ignore everything we say and to cherry pick their own projects. Something obviously has to give.

As you can imagine, my first instinct was to advise my Greens colleagues to vote against this atrocity. We thought it might be worth, however, drafting amendments to see whether it could be fixed or even, heaven forbid, improved. The opposition amendments that Senator Conroy foreshadowed do go some of the way. Our amendments go some of the way—I will talk a bit more about that in a moment and at greater length when we get to the committee stage. But the icing on this particular bit of black humour from the Abbott government was the government's own amendments—because they basically invert or gut the purpose of the bill. It is remarkable. We will see how this plays out when we get to the committee stage. It may be that the Greens will support the bill when all the amendments are finally worked through—on the basis of the fact that the Abbott government itself appears to be in the process of circulating amendments that would fix some of the dopiest features of the bill. That is interesting.

Deputy Prime Minister Warren Truss announced this extraordinary step the other day—and let us pay credit; if he is listening to the evidence, that is what we hope governments will do. He said on Wednesday that the government wanted to clear up 'ambiguities' about planned changes to Infrastructure Australia which had led to a 'misunderstanding' that its intention was to make the body less independent. No, I think we understand perfectly well what the government is attempting to do. Once we have had a chance to take a look at Minister Truss's amendments, it may be that that 'misunderstanding' is in fact cleared up and the bill can proceed. We will see.

The Greens, I foreshadow now, will be moving amendments to put the topic of climate change back on Infrastructure Australia's desk. Can you imagine the mentality of the person, sitting behind the scenes somewhere, who wanted to strike any mention of climate change from Infrastructure Australia—from an advisory body. It does not even force the Abbott government to appear to care about climate change, but it at least says the expert advisory body should pay attention to the impacts of climate change on infrastructure—infrastructure along our coastlines that is getting chewed away, infrastructure that is exposed to increased incidence of bushfires.

Climate change is going to kill people—in heatwaves. The government recently took out the Major Cities Unit, firing everybody that was providing expert advice on the future of Australian cities. It was a reasonably important entity, one would have thought—and kudos to the former Rudd government for setting it up in the first place. Given that we are one of the most heavily urbanised countries in the world, you would think maybe we need some Commonwealth expertise on city policy. Before the unit was bowled over, however, the last State of Australian cities report said that heat deaths in Australian cities would double by 2050, apart from in Queensland and Perth, where they will quadruple. It is real whether you think it is absolute crap or not. The Greens will be moving to bring climate change back within the remit of Infrastructure Australia. It will be remarkably galling for the government to have to accept the amendments to put climate change back in—because we know that a substantial fraction of their executive does not believe that it is happening at all. How nice that must be for them!

The first draft of this bill should clearly never have seen the light of day. I very much look forward to turning it into something readable and into something that may go some way towards improving service delivery and infrastructure provision to communities that desperately need it.