Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly welcome the question because we are proud of our nation building investment funds, to which we have allocated thus far $26 billion. We are proud of them. The legislation, I think, is in the House, is it not? The legislation is in the House and, when it passes, the funds will be deposited and we can engage in a conversation with the Australian people about how we are going to build the nation and invest in infrastructure, unlike those opposite who did not invest in critical economic infrastructure. They left it all to the states and they did nothing.

This weekend, we have a COAG meeting where we are getting together with the state governments for a fundamental reform of federal-state relations. Front and centre of that is infrastructure, which is absolutely critical to this country as we build our wealth creation capacity and make up for the wasted years under Howard and Costello—the wasted years that Access Economics was talking about—

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