House debates

Thursday, 2 March 2017

Governor General's Speech

11:09 am

Photo of Anthony AlbaneseAnthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on the 21st anniversary of my election to the parliament, which happened to be on my birthday as well, way back in 1996. So in terms of the issue before us today, the address-in-reply, this is the eighth opportunity I have had as the member for Grayndler to speak on it. It is a great honour to serve in the House of Representatives, and it is one that I certainly do not take for granted.

Indeed, I had a big decision to make after the electoral redistribution, because the draft boundaries placed my home, as well as my electorate office, in the electorate of Barton. After the final boundaries came out, though, my electorate office was put back into Grayndler. But my home remained just outside the boundary, which became the railway line rather than the Cooks River. Hence, I became a resident of the Barton electorate rather than of Grayndler.

I chose, however, to run for Grayndler because overwhelmingly that is the community that I have represented. I have only lived in three suburbs in my life—Camperdown, Newtown and Marrickville. They are all in the inner west and Grayndler is primarily the inner west electorate.

The other advantage for me contesting Grayndler rather than Barton is that it enabled Linda Burney to be the candidate for Barton and to become the first Indigenous woman to be elected to the House of Representatives. That was a great thing for this parliament and I have no doubt that Linda Burney will be an outstanding representative. She rose in the New South Wales parliament to be the deputy leader of the Labor Party, as well as a senior minister. And she was the first Indigenous person elected to Australia's first parliament, the New South Wales parliament.

It is a very good thing indeed that this parliament has not just Linda Burney but also of course Senator Malarndirri McCarthy and Senator Pat Dodson as representatives from the Labor Party. And it is a very good thing indeed that Ken Wyatt has become the first Aboriginal person to be a minister in an Australian government. That is a good thing for the nation and I certainly wish him well. And we also have Jackie Lambie in the Senate, so there is considerable Indigenous representation in this parliament.

We need to do much better with female representation. This parliament should reflect the nation if it is truly to be representative. I think that bringing in people from different backgrounds to reflect the multicultural, modern nation that is Australia would be a very good thing.

One of my key opponents in the electorate of Grayndler was not a member of the Liberal Party but was a Greens political party opponent. That was the way that campaign was fought out on the ground. In Grayndler and in many similar seats around the nation—like Batman, Sydney and Melbourne—there has been a considerable change in the composition of the population. Many of the newer residents are from generations that have been uplifted by the former Labor governments that opened up our nation's universities, giving the children of working-class families the opportunity to access qualifications and well-paid work. These people are politically savvy and they are very much engaged. My community is a very political community. It has quite large meetings about issues, and the election campaign was no different.

The relative financial security of many of these residents means that they will make judgements on their political allegiances based upon the values and convictions that they hold rather than upon their immediate personal economic concerns. In short, they do not need the state to take any particular action in order to improve their personal economic circumstances. That presents a challenge to political candidates, because certainly they are not self-interested but they are engaged in what is in the national interest. During the election campaign I put forward what was very much my vision for the national interest—about health, about education, about public transport—and I regard the success that I had in that election as being because I communicated and engaged with my electorate on the issues of concern to them. These are people who know that Medicare is critical for those who need health care. They know that we must invest in good schools to extend opportunity to all Australians regardless of their background. They accept that when we are the beneficiaries of opportunities at the hand of government we must stand firmly against any move to reduce opportunity for others. Above all, my constituents understand that the best way to achieve genuine progress is to support a political party that aspires to govern. That is one of the big distinctions between the Labor Party—and the coalition parties for that matter—and minor political parties. We seek to make decisions around a cabinet table, not to protest after decisions are made.

My opponent in Grayndler from the Greens political party made this clear in a video that the Greens party posted, where he argued that he would rather have people protesting on the streets about Indigenous issues, climate change—a range of issues—with Tony Abbott as the Prime Minister than have no-one protesting, with Bill Shorten as the Prime Minister. Essentially, he advocated that it was somehow in the interests of progressives for Tony Abbott to be the Prime Minister. This statement, of course, was made whilst Tony Abbott was in the prime ministership, before he was replaced in a coup by Malcolm Turnbull.

It seems to me that one of the big distinctions amongst progressives is between those people who want to improve the lives of others—and that is what drives me: making a difference to people's educational opportunities, making a difference to their living standards, making a difference to the environment in which they live—and others for whom the protest is the end in itself. I think that is one of the problems with the elements that control the New South Wales Greens political party: for them, the protest is the end in itself, not an outcome. That is why they have been rejected—not just by me, it must be said, but by people like former senator Bob Brown, who has rejected the political ideology of the leadership of the New South Wales Greens.

The 2016 election, of course, was one in which infrastructure policy played a role. In terms of infrastructure, we worked in the context of Australia moving from the investment to the production phase in the resources sector and a considerable drop-off in infrastructure investment. We saw a 20 per cent decline in public sector investment in infrastructure in the first two years of the coalition government.

That primarily came about because of the ideological position of Tony Abbott, outlined in his book Battlelines, that somehow there was no role for the Commonwealth in urban policy and particularly no role in investing in public transport. He argues in the book that in a car man is king and that the private motor car is the focus of a sense of individualism, and somehow public transport is a form of collectivism that brings people together and therefore it should be opposed and the Commonwealth should never invest in public transport. In this, to be fair—unlike the cuts to health, education, pensions, the ABC and SBS that took place—he did foreshadow it prior to the election. He certainly did that with the cuts to the Cross River Rail funding, to the Melbourne Metro project, to public transport in Perth and to the Gawler line electrification in South Australia that were in the budget.

This ripping out of all public transport funding was done, of course, without replacing it, because the projects that were chosen were not projects that stacked up: projects like the controversial Perth Freight Link, which still has not commenced and will be rejected, I believe, by the people of Western Australia on 11 March, and the East West Link in Melbourne, which had a benefit of 45c for every dollar of investment, a dreadful return, and which simply did not stack up and therefore has not proceeded. So we saw, as a result of that, a decline in public investment.

During the election campaign, we offered transformative funding for public transport projects like the Metro, Cross River Rail, AdeLINK, the Perth Metronet, the Western Sydney rail line—including through Badgerys Creek airport—and a new bus mall in Hobart. These are the sorts of projects that we need to engage in and build if we are going to avoid what Infrastructure Australia has identified as $53 billion of costs by the year 2031.

We also had plans to deal with freight. We found out from Senate estimates just this week that, for the Inland Rail line, the government have not yet identified what their preferred corridor is, they have not purchased any land, and they have not dug a hole or laid a sleeper on that project. It was a project that the coalition promised would be under construction last year, by 2016. We promised to proceed with the Inland Rail, but we also supported important projects like the Port Botany freight line. At the moment, between Mascot and the port you have one track that, of course, is two-way, so if freight is going in it cannot go out. It has been duplicated all the way up to Mascot. A lot of infrastructure development and productivity could be gained in that last mile, whether it be road or rail. An investment of just over $200 million could fix that, and could fix the issue around Moorebank by creating a loop to separate the lines there. That would have an enormous productivity benefit, yet this government just does not seem interested in investing in it.

During the election campaign we saw from the government total commitments of $850 million to 78 small road projects around the nation, most of which could best be characterised as local or at best state government projects. There was not a single major national infrastructure commitment during the election campaign. That is the first time in the eight election campaigns that I have contested where one side of politics has not proposed a single major infrastructure project. It was quite extraordinary. Instead, we had projects like the $1 million allocated for a road at Gresford in the upper Hunter Valley that is used for a billy cart race. That is not nation-building; that should not be the priority for major infrastructure and national government. I am sure it is a very good race and I am sure it is a lot of fun, but there is nothing fun about congestion in our cities. The government has to deal with that. The government cannot continue to go around and pretend that projects like the Great Eastern Highway and Gateway WA—projects that were funded by the former Labor government—were something that just appeared when government changed in 2013. The government has to get on with major infrastructure development. It was told that again last Friday by the Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, who said very clearly what was required.

During the campaign we also committed to major road projects like the M80 ring road; the Queensland Gateway and Pacific highway merge just north of the Gold Coast, between the Gold Coast in Brisbane; and the Wanneroo and Roe highway overpasses in Perth. We promised also to create the authority for a high-speed rail line. That is the sort of vision that we need in this country. Every other continent on the planet is seeing high-speed rail rolled out. When we have such a concentration of our population as we have down the east coast, between Brisbane and Melbourne via Sydney, it is a doable achievement to have high-speed rail along that route. We need to get on with the planning and with the reservation of the corridor to make sure that that can happen.

What we have seen under this government is a decline. Under the former government we lifted per capita infrastructure investment from $132 per Australian to $225. When Labor took office we were 20th on a list of OECD countries for infrastructure investment as a proportion of GDP. When we left office Australia was first. Australia is no longer first, sadly, because this government does not have an agenda for infrastructure and does not have an agenda for growth and jobs. It has a slogan; it does not have any substance behind it.

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