David Johnston (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

This amendment purports to give Infrastructure Australia powers to evaluate specific projects that are not appropriate for inclusion in this bill. This is not the enabling legislation for Infrastructure Australia's functions. The Infrastructure Australia legislation has a section on responsibilities, which Labor and the Greens recently passed. Now they wish to make what appears to the government to be a back-door amendment to Infrastructure Australia's powers and, interestingly, to provide the minister with powers of direction over Infrastructure Australia. The 17A heading is 'Consultation with Infrastructure Australia'. The opposition should acknowledge that the heading should say 'Ministerial Directions over Infrastructure Australia', because that is exactly what this amendment is seeking to achieve. It is terribly unclear, may I say, in furtherance of what I have already said, what matters should be included in this evaluation that the opposition is proposing.

The provision would need to prescribe the matters that must be covered in an evaluation, as those matters are not specified in the Infrastructure Australia Act, for the purposes of the general evaluation function—that is, it needs to be made clear what is the intended relationship with the scheme for evaluations under the Infrastructure Australia Act. This amendment does not even go close to doing anything like that. So it is inappropriate that any provisions purporting to give Infrastructure Australia power should be provided for in this bill, which has a completely different purpose, as I have sought to establish.

The correct place for provisions relating to Infrastructure Australia functions and powers is in its own enabling legislation. The opposition stated that it wishes the government to stand by its election commitment, and has repeated that again this morning, and on Infrastructure Australia assessing proposals of over $100 million. To ensure the government does this, it proposed amendments to the Land Transport Infrastructure Amendment Bill 2014. The government said:

That is what we promised to the people at the last election, and we stand by that.

It is important that this bill not be further delayed by the undermining tactics of this amendment. The opposition had the opportunity to include these changes and those relating to the heavy vehicle program when in government. The question must be asked: it was just 12 months ago that the opposition had the capacity to make these amendments to this bill, so why did they not do so?

Under the former minister, Infrastructure Australia had no independence and simply prioritised projects based on how developed a business case was and not on whether it had any sustainable merit. The former government did not apply this government's level of transparency to their investments. There is no better example than that there was no cost-benefit analysis done for the NBN, the biggest single infrastructure project in Australia's history. After designing their plans for the NBN on the back of a beer coaster, Labor initially told us that the NBN would cost $43 billion and then revised it up to $44 billion. But the NBN strategic review, released in December last year, showed that the network would actually cost $73 billion.

Let's be very clear: we do not want to hold up money, vital resources and funding from going to local governments any longer. Let's just let this bill do what it clearly sets out to do, and that is to fund the Roads to Recovery program.