Michael Sukkar (Deakin, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an honour to speak today on Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2014-2015 and cognate bills. Given the wide-ranging nature of the debate, I want to focus on an issue of paramount importance to not only my electorate of Deakin and the state of Victoria but, increasingly, all Australians and that is the progress of Melbourne's East West Link. I refer to the abysmal way in which that project is now, purportedly, being handled by the state Labor government and, unfortunately, the way in which that project is being treated by the Leader of the Opposition, given some comments that he made earlier today, which I will refer to a little bit later on.

For those who do not know, the East West Link is the most important infrastructure project, in recent memory, in Melbourne. It is a cross-city link that will basically enable the free flow of traffic from, as the title would suggest, the east to the west of Melbourne, saving commuters in my electorate of Deakin and, indeed, all throughout Melbourne, up to three hours of travel time a week, enabling the free flow of goods from our major port to the eastern suburbs and indeed the western suburbs of Melbourne and also the free flow of all goods between small businesses operating in Melbourne. So it is, absolutely, a productivity-enhancing piece of infrastructure. It is also a piece of infrastructure that will improve the lives of Melburnians who are living in an ever congested city. With a population set to grow quite significantly in the years to come, quite frankly, it is a project that will be catching up on work that should have been done previously.

I was very fortunate to be able to secure $1½ billion before the last election for stage 1 of the East West Link, which was really the federal contribution that unlocked the ability of that project to happen. We were then able to secure an additional $1½ billion before the election for stage 2 of the East West Link. So, $3 billion of federal funding was committed to ensure that this transformational infrastructure project could go ahead. On the basis of that very generous commitment, the former state government committed, with a consortium, to proceed with the project.

Where we are now is that the project is shovel ready, it is fully funded with contributions committed from the federal and former state governments and, obviously, from private operators. The problem is now, though, that the state Labor Party is committing to tear up the contracts and potentially open up Victorian taxpayers to hundreds of millions of dollars—if not over $1 billion—of compensation not to build the East West Link. It is quite extraordinary. We now have a state Labor government which has said, 'No thank you. We don't want the $3 billion the federal government's committed to the East West Link. And not only are we going to say we don't want the $3 billion commitment, we're actually going to cancel the contract that we said before the election wasn't worth the paper it was written on. We know that was a lie. But we will cancel a contract and pay potentially over $1 billion not to build the East West Link, a piece of infrastructure that the Labor Party has championed for many years, all the way back to 2008.'

In the submissions to the 2008 Eddington review, which was commissioned by the former state Labor Party under John Brumby, there was a very good submission from the Australian Workers Union. The key submitter here was Bill Shorten, the National Secretary. They absolutely supported the East West Link and said it was crucial to the future development of Victoria and was key to the economic prosperity of Victorians.

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