Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Newcastle for her question. This morning I visited the Hunter with the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the member for Hunter and the Premier of New South Wales. There we visited a site where we saw the government’s nation-building plans in action. In the Hunter the government’s injection of $1.2 billion as part of its economic stimulus package last December is reaping real benefits in creating jobs today and in building the infrastructure that we need for tomorrow. One of those loop lines has already been opened, and today the Prime Minister turned the first sod on the first rail track on the main northern railway in the Hunter. This project itself will support some 150 of the 650 jobs that will be supported in the Hunter region.

On the way there, we passed through Maitland, a community that will benefit from our investment in the new Hunter expressway. This is a project that the coalition promised to deliver but never did. There is more chance of finding a mention of Malcolm Turnbull on the Peter Costello website than there is of finding some real activity from those opposite when it comes to the Hunter expressway—

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