Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Infrastructure Australia Amendment (Independent Review) Bill 2023. The Greens will be supporting this bill. However, there are improvements that we would like to see made to it, so I foreshadow that I will move some amendments during the committee stage. We support the proposals that the government have put forward to improve scrutiny and planning for infrastructure projects, but there is still more to be done.

I remember when Infrastructure Australia was first set up, in 2008. It was the end of my six years on council, when I was very focused on transport and infrastructure projects. It was during the Rudd government years. Sadly, Infrastructure Australia has never lived up to its claims to be a truly independent, truly transparent and truly evidence-led in its analysis of transport projects, which is what we need in an oversight body like Infrastructure Australia. Infrastructure Australia says that its mission is to 'advise governments, industry and community on the investments and reforms needed to deliver better infrastructure for all Australians'. Critical to doing that is to have a real focus on integrity and a real focus on transparency and to make sure that processes and analysis are evidence led so we can work out where we will get the best value for money with our infrastructure.

We haven't got billions of dollars to just throw around at infrastructure projects that don't stack up. It's important in doing the analysis of what infrastructure projects we should be investing in that the process is transparent, that we make sure that the community know clearly the criteria that projects are being assessed against and that the recommendations being made by our infrastructure body address the outcomes that we want to see in our infrastructure.

What makes better infrastructure is infrastructure that optimises the ecological, social and economic value to address the issues that we currently face. In particular, that means that the infrastructure we establish, that we put our investment into, has to address inequality, climate and the ecological issues that we face. Getting the measures right, getting the governance right, and making sure that the processes that a body like Infrastructure Australia does are completely transparent, completely accountable and, critically, that the decisions and the recommendations are evidence led, is so crucial.

Sadly, this hasn't been the case over the years that I've been here in this Senate. In the last parliament I was a participating member of the Finance and Public Administration References Committee's inquiry when it scrutinised the car park rorts under the last government. They were an incredibly significant bit of infrastructure—but what a disgrace! We had infrastructure planning that was a complete rabble, basically. We saw members of parliament announcing car parks with no consultation or planning. We saw car parks that should never have been built. We saw delays of years and years, as councils were suddenly lumped with announcements that they had no engagement on or capacity to deliver. Most of all, we saw far too little investment in public transport projects, which—the evidence is clear—are the investment we need in our cities to deal with congestion. The whole claim of the car parks, that they were congestion busting, was based on no evidence. There was no evidence whatsoever that that was the case.

We know that we have to have much more investment in public transport. If you do the analysis, if you have evidence led assessment of infrastructure projects, public transport projects that are well planned for appropriate public transport win out every time. They will be what makes a real difference to people's lives. Transport funding is about improving the lives of voters, constituents and community members across the country. It's about shortening commutes through better planning, so that people can get home to their families sooner rather than spending hours waiting for a bus that never arrives or being stuck in the rain at a train station. It's about making our roads safer for cyclists and everyone else. I've heard and I've shared far too many accounts of cyclists killed, sadly. We know that some of those lives could have been saved, some of those deaths prevented—