Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would love to think that we have heard a lot of vision today but we have not heard a lot of vision. I point out that one of my great political favourites was FT Roosevelt. What did he do? He built stuff. We, as a country, are collecting roughly $404 billion of income—that is, royalties, taxpayer revenue. We are spending about $434 billion. We are running at a deficit.

The critical part for us to remember is: of that $434 billion, $154 billion is in the welfare budget—one-third. To our shame as a country, we are only spending $6 billion on road and rail. The challenge for us, as a country, is we need to find ways of reducing our welfare expenditure and moving our investment into infrastructure in a greater capacity. Ultimately, we have got Frank Lowy, we have got the Governor of the Reserve Bank out there saying that we should be spending $30 billion a year on infrastructure. What I have heard in the chamber today is one side does something better than the other, and the other side does something better. Really, I have heard no vision from a lot of people in this chamber. We should be aiming for a figure of $30 billion in infrastructure spending. It is not just money; it is management.

We built a project in Mildura recently called the Sunraysia Modernisation Project for $103 million. We put six business people over the top of this project so when they built things they looked at how they could do it and do it efficiently. Instead of the project at full scope costing $160 million, we were able to build the whole thing for $120 million. We actually invested in infrastructure and put management over it.

Now is the time to be increasing our investment in infrastructure. We have the free trade agreements which have been delivered by the coalition government. These have given us great opportunities to hit the marketplace. We have opportunities for the products we produce like we cannot believe. We have the capacity. We are investing in our people through the prepare, train, hire program so that we can have Australians who can have a good job as they reap the benefits of the free trade agreements.

But we do not have the infrastructure capacity to capitalise on the free trade agreements. Do you know you can shift a tonne of wheat from the central parts of Canada to the port, 3,000 kilometres cheaper than you can shift a tonne of wheat 400 kilometres in Australia? This is to our shame. We should be investing in infrastructure. Sure, we are doing a lot, but we should be doing more. Thirty billion dollars should be our aim. It should be well thought out, and there should be good management around that.

We as a country are run by people on this side who have been in small business, and people in small business know there is a difference between a cash flow in and a cash flow out capacity in the business, when you are taking borrowings, to set up your business for the long-term structure and future. I have run a business for 20 years. I understand how this works. At a time when we can borrow money at 1.75 per cent and when we have a mining industry that went from the construction stage to the extraction stage, there is both a capacity to build in the economy and a capacity to access finance to build the things that are going to allow us to capitalise on the free trade agreements.

My only fear is that, because the Labor Party, when they were in government, ultimately cemented long-term structural parts in our budget, we are now spending $154 billion out of our welfare budget. That makes it a little bit more difficult for us to then free up money to put into capital and building infrastructure. I think separating parts of our budget and saying we are going to borrow more and build for the future is something that would be welcomed by many Australians.

This is also a way of stimulating the state governments, because when you build infrastructure you create payroll tax, which is a state government tax; and when you build infrastructure you create stamp duty, which is a state government tax. We should be making the argument to state governments that they should take more of a share of funding health and education, and we should take more of a share of funding infrastructure. Doing so would both stimulate their capacity to have a robust economic boom in their state and remove capacity constraints so that we can capitalise on the free trade agreements that we as a coalition signed. What I have seen here today are lots of arguments between us, but not much vision for spending $30 billion a year— (Time expired)

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