House debates

Tuesday, 30 May 2017

Matters of Public Importance

Infrastructure

3:57 pm

Photo of Kevin HoganKevin Hogan (Page, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Grayndler interrupts. I remind the member for Grayndler that before the 2013 election he publicly said that his federal government was going to stop funding the Pacific Highway at 80 per cent and put it back to 50 per cent. You are on the public record saying that. But what did we do? We maintained the funding of the Pacific Highway at 80 per cent, and that is what we did. So we are delivering the Pacific Highway at 80 per cent funding. Direct jobs are involved in this. And obviously, with indirect jobs, you are probably talking about 7,000 to 8,000 jobs in my community, because we continued. We delivered at 80 per cent not at the 50 per cent funding that the member for Grayndler wanted. We do this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it reduces and has reduced fatalities on the highway and that is very important. Obviously it is a job boost in the building, but there is also the tourism activity and the better transport facilities. We will deliver this by 2020. It was in stark contrast with what the Labor Party wanted to do with it.

Some of my fellow colleagues have very articulately spoken about the inland rail and the billions we are spending on that. That will take traffic off coastal roads like mine. There is the Western Sydney airport, which Labor could just never get its head around and deliver, but we are. And there is obviously Snowy hydro—not only important in infrastructure, but we are obviously also focused on delivering, not intermittent—

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