Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McKenzie, I'm not sure what you were doing at around 10 o'clock this morning, but at 10 o'clock this morning Catherine King, the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development, delivered a press conference where she actually went through this entire issue in detail: the projects that are proceeding, the projects that are being delayed and the projects that have no hope whatsoever of being delivered. As I said, just to take Queensland as one example, we are providing more than $2 billion extra funding in infrastructure to deliver a range of projects—the Brisbane to the Gold Coast rail and the Rockhampton ring road, which I know Senator Canavan has been very exercised about—right across Queensland. A range of projects right across Australia can now actually proceed because the Albanese government has done the hard work of looking at each of those projects and working out what can be delivered, what there is funding for, what there is a business case for and which ones, in contrast, had no hope ever of being delivered and were only lines on a press release. That's what we used to get from the National Party in an infrastructure program, not real funding and real projects. (Time expired)