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

This has been the longest day. In parliamentary terms it is in its 131st hour, so it has indeed been a very, very long day—and it has been an extraordinary day. On indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, can I just pass on my congratulations to our new leader, Tony Abbott, the member for Warringah. I wish him all the best. We will be fighting hard with him, because this will be a big fight. I also place on record my deep and sincere thanks to Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, also a dear friend, and I wish him all the very best at this time. He showed tremendous grace today, and I commend him for that. So we go forward, choosing clearly to give the planet, but not Kevin Rudd, the benefit of the doubt.

The Trade Practices Amendment (Infrastructure Access) Bill 2009 is a very important piece of reform which the coalition supports. This bill is part of a process of reform that has been going on for almost two decades and it adds to the work of successive governments. In our island continent, how we plan, build and operate our infrastructure to serve the needs of our people and their industries will be, I believe, our biggest challenge during the time I hope to serve in this parliament. Today we have an unexpected new framework against which all of our infrastructure decisions must be taken. Treasury’s revised forecast that Australia will be home to 35 million people by 2049 is a profound and challenging statistic, one that we need to get our heads around, and we must frame policy in this place across many different areas as we go forward.

I believe there is genuine and understandable concern in our community about how we will cope with this number of people and what we need to do to cope with this number of people, with a national survey published just two weeks ago revealing that four in 10 Australians are now worried about whether the infrastructure, the services and the various other things that we provide to sustain the quality of life in this country can service that population. These are fair questions, these are honest questions, and they are questions we must wrestle with in this parliament and in our policies.

Growth is a good thing—growth is a very good thing—and we need to also acknowledge that as we go forward in this debate. Our solution for dealing with growth is effective action now to encourage infrastructure provision that will meet our transport, education and health needs, and boost our export industries. There is no other option; we simply must achieve infrastructure resources that deliver new productivity gains and new competitiveness in our global markets if we are going to be able to provide and sustain the quality of life that we enjoy today and I am sure we hope future generations will enjoy.

The challenges that sit under this very complex policy conundrum relate to how we are going to deal with some very important issues, and they are as follows: we have the challenge of a shortfall of 200,000 dwellings in our housing resources, with construction unable to match our immediate growth rates let alone address the backlog; we have the challenge of coal loaders lining up 20, 40 or 50 at a time outside our terminals at Newcastle or Dalrymple Bay, wasting time and money; we have the challenge of a rail system that fails to maximise our productivity, with visionary projects such as the inland railway from Victoria to Queensland being placed on the backburner; we have the challenge of a road network masked by its missing links, not least of which is the F6 freeway extension from Sydney to the New South Wales South Coast and in particular the Illawarra which is the missing link in Sydney’s road system, which those opposite have chosen at both a state and a federal level to ignore time and again; and there are the challenges of public transport systems that need to be able to move a growing population around our cities, particularly when we are looking at having populations of seven million in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, and a doubling of the population of Brisbane over the period that I have referred to. These are all big challenges, and hit-and-miss announcements of infrastructure upgrades will not deliver on them.

Look no further than hints recently of the opening of the Richmond Air Force base to commercial aircraft, with a complete lack of thought for the absence of adequate road and rail infrastructure to support those aircraft movements. Richmond has been defined as a potential or interim second airport. I know that the residents of that area—having spoken to the now member for Greenway and hopefully next member for Macquarie—have genuine concerns that this short-term second airport will become a long-term second airport. You cannot go and place those sorts of commitments on a local community when the infrastructure is simply not there to support an operation of that kind, let alone deal with the issues that relate to national security matters—how that airport would operate and how it will interface with its very important work, much of which is emergency service and rescue work and things of that nature at that base. That is what our Air Force and armed services are involved in. The infrastructure is currently not there to support that type of arrangement. It is important than when we make decisions about infrastructure they are not made in a slapdash way which only adds further burdens and complicates the problem rather than putting in place a long-term plan that will deliver on what we will need in the future.

A faster growing population must be viewed, as I said, as an opportunity. It is now time that we as a nation took a view on what our population target should be. It is not good enough for this government to simply say, ‘Our population is projected to be 35 million by 2049,’ and that is it. That is a number we need to think about. It is a number that we have to understand in terms of what our infrastructure can support. How are we going to grow our economy over that period of time to support a population of that size? We need to form considered views about that and then ensure that we take the responsible action to deliver on the consequences of our decision. If we say that there is going to be a population of a particular size, then the consequences of that are what we need to do in terms of how we run fiscal policy, infrastructure policy and regulatory policy in this country. We need to ensure that we put in place, for future generations, what we need.

I recall when I was in primary school, those 35 years ago, we visited not this place but the one down the hill, and they had to make the decisions on these same issues that we are going to have to make for the future. I remember the population at that time was around 13 million, and the scale of the increase was similar to what we face now over the next 40 years. So those in that time in that place made their decisions; we now in this place must make similar decisions, and good decisions, for the future.

The more substantial question is: how do we work through the policy challenges? Can we provide the infrastructure through public and private means? If not, what adjustments will need to be made to immigration or family policy and what adjustments will need to be made to infrastructure provision to match the framework we hope people will live in? Once we move into these sorts of questions, we can see there are ramifications across so many policy areas. We also see the governance challenges. The role of local councils, for example, becomes incredibly important—their planning policies, land availability; the provision of roads, waste collection and landfill, and waste management more generally—all the basic services that we depend on. States will need to assess population trends for everything from land release and public transport through to water and sewerage and the like—even policing. Federal policy adjustments to meet population trends go well beyond immigration and into communications, education, labour resources and our skills base, environmental impacts and many more areas. Human services provision alone ranges from pension entitlements to unemployment benefits.

I note with interest today that the debate is far from settled inside the government. Until today, all we had heard was the population projection of 35 million, through the Intergenerational reporta process which was begun by the Treasurer under the former government, the former member for Higgins. Now at least the member for Wills, I notice, has entered the debate and said, ‘There should be 26 million.’ He is entitled to that view, and I am glad that one person on the government benches is thinking about population policy and what is needed. Whether he is right about that is the nature of the debate, and it is a debate I think we should be keen to get into. The point is this: there is no distinguishable, coherent population policy coming from the government at this time, despite their having had two years to grapple with these issues. The fact is, as I said before, that growth is good, but growth will only be good if it is backed by a coordinated, proactive policy that delivers the infrastructure and services needed not only to support the population but also to sustain and enhance the quality of life we aspire to for all Australians in the future.

For infrastructure provision in particular, the task requires governments to come together to remove any possible roadblock to this growth. It means abandoning lazy, disinterested approaches to regulatory reform, which this bill I fairly acknowledge will address, and it demands a new concerted effort at all levels of government and, most importantly, in the relationship between governments and the private sector. Genuine regulatory reform must be an ongoing process. The Howard government made hard yards on this. Australia cannot now afford to see that momentum dwindle or be lost.

This legislation, as I mentioned, does take up something of these challenges that lie ahead of us and, as I said, it is supported by the coalition—drawing on the reform initiatives over almost two decades. Its intent is to increase regulatory certainty and streamline administrative processes under the National Access Regime. It is about how we better utilise the scarce infrastructure resources we as a nation have invested in, whether that investment has occurred from a private or public purse, and it is about certainty for business so they can make decisions about their investments with some knowledge of the processes and that those processes may be speedy to ensure that they can give their investments best effect.

The National Access Regime allows potential users of essential infrastructure to seek access on reasonable terms if commercial negotiation with the owner or operator has failed. Examples of essential infrastructure are natural gas pipelines, the electricity grid and rail track—assets which play a leading role in Australia’s economic growth. I refer to the Parliamentary Library’s most relevant quote from an article put together by Koshy and Kenyon, ‘Third-Party Access to Infrastructure: The Case of the Mount Newman Rail Line in the Pilbara’, where they say:

It is often the case that a market is dominated by a single piece of infrastructure and some form of monopolistic power is conferred on the firm owning the infrastructure, both in the existing, as well as related, markets. This can occur to the extent that the firm exhibits quite marked pricing power or where it is uneconomic for other firms to duplicate the infrastructure.

To balance the rights of consumers with the infrastructure owner in such cases, Australia has developed a national system for third party access to key economic infrastructures. This system allows potential competitors to seek access to infrastructure as a means to introduce competition into affected markets.

That is what these changes are seeking to achieve and that is why they are supported. The reality check, though, is that this bill actions one or two outstanding matters from COAG decisions and a Productivity Commission review, the vast majority of which—there are now just a number are remaining, which include those in this bill—were actioned by the previous government as a sound momentum of reform on these matters. That government enacted a series of improvements to the way that the National Access Regime operates, streamlining regulatory processes and applying meaningful deadlines and binding time limits. The Howard government was prepared to take hard decisions and it understood that infrastructure was not just about building things but about making sure that the things that are built, whether by governments or the private sector, could operate to best efficiency. There is no greater example of the tectonic shift in the performance of our infrastructure than the historic waterfront reforms of the Howard government, which saw crane rates—part of the infrastructure that sits all around our ports—move in productivity from an average of 17.1 containers an hour in 1996 to 28.2 containers an hour by 2004. Infrastructure policy is not just about hard hats, luminous vests and press releases but about the whole process of how we build it, how we plan it and how we operate it. That is why regulatory reform in this area is so vital.

More concerning, there is no indication that this government is giving any thought to coordinating a new infrastructure strategy other than statements of intent. Labor was elected on a platform that included:

… a pipeline of critical infrastructure projects will be available allowing the infrastructure sector to invest with certainty and make best use of available skills and resources.

This was the commitment of the now Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, but does anyone remember that he also said in the same breath that ‘superannuation fund managers, private investors and industry groups have been calling out for national leadership and coordination’? My point here is that there is plenty of rhetoric about moving forward with an infrastructure pipeline, but we are not seeing that followed through in practice. The Business Council of Australia, the Productivity Commission or those operating in industry are looking for the leadership that the minister for infrastructure said he would provide. But what they are seeing instead is a real failure to coordinate and streamline between government agencies, a failure to deliver on basic commitments, a failure to attack the central need in any significant way other than to pick up the work left over by the previous government that they had already spelt out and, in particular, a real failure to follow through with undertaking proper cost benefit analysis on projects such as the O-Bahn project in South Australia.

Regardless of what your views on the O-Bahn project might be, you do not go and invest tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money based on a flyover in a helicopter. That is not proper cost benefit analysis. That is not transparent. That is old-fashioned pork-barrelling infrastructure spending—something that this government made many accusations about when they were in opposition. Now, when they find themselves on the Treasury bench, they fly over cities in helicopters deciding where the votes are and ensuring the money follows. That is not proper cost benefit analysis. That is not proper transparency.

The government refuse to release the analysis on the projects they committed to. That is not proper transparency and that is not proper decision-making for a government that says it is all about proper processes. So what we are not seeing is a pipeline of projects that the private sector can be cognisant of as the direction of future infrastructure investment in this country. That is what we need. Infrastructure Australia is a fine organisation led by a fine individual in Michael Deegan. It is doing outstanding work, but it is not being listened to by this government. It is basically an outpost of great intellect and great merit but one that literally sits without influence in this government. I wish it had influence because if it did I think we would be getting a greater direction on where these dollars should be spent.

We need to recognise that at the end of the day the federal government does not spend 100 per cent of the money spent on infrastructure in this country. It is not the federal government. If you went by the government’s rhetoric on this issue, you would think that every brick that is being laid in this country, every load of cement that is being poured as a slab, was as a result of the direct investment of the Rudd government. That is the expectation that they created and that is the perception in government that they are trying to maintain. It is an absolute nonsense. The government is spending a handful of the dollars that are actually spent on infrastructure in this country. The private sector, the states and local governments are the heavy-lifters and have always been the heavy-lifters on infrastructure spending in this country. I believe that people will increasingly be disappointed as they wake up to the spin of this government, which says, ‘It’s actually us doing all this work.’ At the end of the day the people who are really making it happen are those in the private sector who are out there investing their dollars, and what they are looking for is direction.

It is the government’s obligation to create the right policy environment, a coordinated policy approach between federal, state, territory and local governments, to deliver reform and encourage private sector activity. It means ensuring governments are appropriately tasked, responsible, accountable and working together. It means targeting scarce resources, public and private, to projects that support and service growth and productivity gains for the long term. It is about conditioning a positive environment, whether it is in pricing issues or other regulatory matters. It is about planning it, building it and running it, and we need a policy that deals with all three. They are interlinked. If you cannot run it properly, you will not attract the finance. If the planning is substandard the costs will increase, and if costs are high, not least through excessive taxes and charges that run to construction projects like bees to a honey pot, then the economics of the work will be compromised and that work may not get done.

As I look at this bill, I support its intent. It carries on the many reforms that have been taking place over many years. But we still do not have a forward infrastructure agenda that deals with planning it, building it and operating it. This government is dealing with the leftovers of reform that they have picked up from the previous government. They will be supported because these are our reforms, basically, at the end of the day. I call on the government and the minister for infrastructure to put away his hard hat, to put away his vest, to put away his camera, to put away all of the trappings of politicking that go with the infrastructure investment under this government, and get out his pencil and his calculator and sit down with those like Infrastructure Australia who are trying to put a genuine pipeline of projects on the drawing board and listen to them and do the homework that he said he would do and be upfront and honest with the Australian people about where the bang for the buck is going to be in these investments. That is what is going to address our challenges for the future. (Time expired)

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