Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I commend Senator McKenzie for her matter of public importance today, which is that the Albanese government are proposing to increase migration to Australia by 1.5 million people over the next five years, while at the same time they have put at risk more than 400 congestion-busting projects through a 90-day infrastructure review, which has today hit 190 days and counting. I wanted to restate those words, because Labor speakers have been off in the weeds talking about all sorts of things, and most of them, of course, based in Victoria.

Labor is failing at the most basic job of government. It is failing to deliver basic planning. In northern Australia we have real projects that the coalition committed funding to and that were on track to being delivered. Some of them even Labor had agreed were important; for example, the Cairns water supply project, a project that Labor committed to commencing at the beginning of this year. Cairns, with its itinerant population and enormous number of tourists, will be out of water by 2026-27. This deadline looms large. Labor have gone missing on something they committed to in order to try to win Leichhardt and other seats in Queensland. Thank goodness they didn't win Leichhardt and there is still a strong and passionate coalition member there ensuring that someone holds the government to account. When Cairns is under pressure because of a shortage of water, who is going to solve it? It won't be the Labor government, because they are failing. They are failing to deliver basic projects like sealing dirt roads and upgrading gravel roads. These projects are in places that Labor members wouldn't have heard of, but they are places that deliver food and fibre to this country and to our neighbours. They deliver mining, tourism, jobs. The jobs and GDP of this nation come from these infrastructure projects.

Labor have been so distracted that they are failing on the basic job of planning. With this unplanned migration they're doing their very best to make it harder to live in this country, particularly for northern Australians. We have such a housing shortage, yet they are bringing hundreds of thousands more people into the country with no places for them to sleep, to lay their heads down at night. They are happy to spend half a billion dollars on a referendum. They're happy to back-in the unions' industrial relations legislation on same job, same pay, which is driving up costs on the very projects that they are delaying. With every day that passes, the only people who are benefiting from this are Labor's union mates, who are driving the agenda of this government. They are certainly not driving affordability and liveability for people who live in regional Australia; in particular, northern Australia. These are the people who are growing the food and fibre, doing the mining and hosting the tourism projects, and they're in the remote parts of the country where allegedly those opposite seek to close the gap. In not providing a proper bitumen road that means communities are not cut off for four months of the year, Labor is failing to do anything for those communities.

When I look at the Mobile Black Spot Program for additional telecommunication towers, I notice that not one of them is outside a Labor seat. It's extraordinary, isn't it, Mr Acting Deputy President, from a government that previously went on and on about transparency and making sure projects go to the right places? Apparently, the right places are inner-city Melbourne, inner-city Sydney and other places that already have sealed roads and mobile phone towers. This is a government that's failing at the basics.