Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

One in seven, as the member for Dunkley said. Only one in seven dollars of the government’s stimulus has been spent on economic infrastructure. As a courtesy to the government, I thought I should inform them of what economic infrastructure is, because they seem to have a difficulty in understanding it. According to the Productivity Commission, it means this: electricity, gas, water and sewerage, urban transport, ports, railways, telecommunications—that is what economic infrastructure is. Investments in these things provide for the long term performance of our economy and the long term future of this country. In response to questions in this place yesterday, I understand, the minister came to the dispatch box and talked about school halls and public housing being economic infrastructure. He is deluded. Economic infrastructure is infrastructure that produces an economic dividend that will help us pay back the mounting debt that this government is racking up on a daily basis.

So only 14 per cent—one in seven dollars—found its way into actual economic stimulus projects that were involved in economic infrastructure. Of the $22 billion that was announced in the budget, only $8 billion was spent on roads, rail and ports. These projects, incidentally, require another $60 billion of investment so that they can be finished. The government is happy to start some projects but, unless they can find $60 billion, none of those projects gets to be finished. The government’s program is one that they have deliberately decided to be wide but not deep. This project does not go deep; this program does not go deep. What it does is to spread noise far and wide—an announcement here and an announcement there, there is something for everybody—but when you look hard or under the surface the roots do not go down deep.

It reminded me of when I went to Sunday school. There was a great story we used to learn at Sunday school. It was the parable of the sower. I remind members that the parable of the sower told of where the seed was scattered. It reminded me of where the government are scattering the funds that they have available to them. When I read that parable—if it was the Prime Minister who was doing parables it would be the parable of the spinner, not the parable of the sower—it said:

Behold the sower went out to sow and as he sowed some seeds fell beside the road and the birds came and ate them.

With the economic stimulus projects, I would call that the cash splash.

Others fell on the rocky places where they did not have much soil, but immediately they sprang up because they had no depth in soil…

like so many of the government’s projects.

…but when the sun had risen they were scorched because they had no root and they withered away.

Think no more about pink batts and even the First Home Owners’ Grant, which was a worthy project in its endeavours but in terms of economic infrastructure it meant absolutely nothing. The parable continues:

Others fell among the thorns and the thorns came up and choked them out…

and we think of things like the SIHIP program in the Northern Territory where we can spend hundreds of millions of dollars and not build one house. We can think of the public housing program where only one in 10 of the projects which need to be completed by now have been completed and fewer than half of those that need to be under way by now have got under way. Projects that are lagging and falling behind are going to be the ones that put the pressure on interest rates down the track. These are the projects that the Reserve Bank governor is worried about because of the delays.

The projects we needed to invest in, when I go back to the parable of the sower, were those that fell on good soil and yielded a crop some hundred-fold, some 60-, and some 30-. They are the projects we need in this country but they are not the projects we are seeing. We are seeing only 14 per cent of stimulus spending going into projects that deliver that type of an economic dividend. The BCA had many other things to say and I will run through them in the time I have remaining. They raised serious questions, and effectively put a vote of no confidence in the government’s plan when they said in relation to urban infrastructure that the government had created confusion about roles and responsibilities. The government has stormed in, thrown some money around, and they have created confusion about who is responsible for what. With regard to transparency, where the government made much of its great approach, it refused to release the cost benefit analysis undertaken by Infrastructure Australia on the projects it has spent money on. It refused to provide that information. The BCA was highly critical of that approach.

No plan to address the nation’s freight challenge, at all. With water, they are buying air—thin air, rather than spending on replumbing Australia’s rural and regional areas. With electricity, they have completely lost control of the agenda and they have let go a transitionary agenda regardless of what happens to the ETS. What they are not doing, if the ETS goes ahead in its current form, is dealing with the problem of electricity generators. It will be on this government’s head if the generators switch off as a result of its failure to provide a transitionary plan. But the best is the broadband: from $4.5 billion or thereabouts to over $40 billion and we still do not have a business plan. As the BCA report said, ‘…with little or no supporting analysis…’. This is not a plan to invest in deep. This is a plan to invest in wide. It is a disgrace. (Time expired)

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