Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Of course I would like to have more money to invest in beef roads, but these are tight budget times. We have put aside a significant investment here and, therefore, we have been seeking to maximise the benefit that that spending can have for our beef industry. We have done so by ensuring that this is very much a grassroots-driven system. We have had three roundtables across Northern Australia, including at Kununurra, in Darwin and in Rockhampton. More than 150 people attended to provide their input from the beef sector about what the important roads were for the government to invest in.

We have also invested in a very new, innovative and exciting CSIRO tool, the TraNSIT tool, which effectively now maps cattle movements right across the country over time and lets the CSIRO provide us with evidence about if we invest in a certain road or remove a certain bottleneck how much per head the industry will save. Those arrangements have ensured that we have good decisions with this money, and it is a great model for future investments in our road network.