Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Minister for Population, Cities and Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

I will make a few remarks in relation to what is in the budget, particularly with regard to my portfolio responsibility, and, if time allows, I will briefly address the Leppington issue.

I might start by referencing the population settings. Our population settings in the budget are often quite unremarkable. But, in this year's budget, they were actually remarkable, because we were forecasting for this financial year and next financial year to have the slowest population growth since World War I. That has largely resulted because net overseas migration has come to a grinding halt since we closed the borders in March. We are forecasting for this financial year, for the first time in 75 years, to actually have a negative net overseas migration, and that will continue next year—before it picks up again in years three and four.

They are very important estimates in the budget context because obviously our population growth, largely driven by international migration, is a very significant economic driver for Australia. It has been since Europeans arrived on these shores. As members would be aware, we are going through the process of carefully but safely starting to reopen those borders so that we can, firstly, get the Australians back who want to come home and, secondly, also get those skilled people and other migrants back into the country to continue to support our economic growth, cultural growth and social growth.

Let me touch briefly on the infrastructure side—complementing the Deputy Prime Minister's comments earlier. In some respects, one of the few silver linings of having a very slow population growth over the next couple of years is that it gives us the opportunity, particularly in our large capital cities, to catch up on what many in the big cities would say would be a backlog of desperately needed infrastructure to be built. We are certainly contributing our share in terms of doing this, because in this budget we added a further $9.7 billion—bringing our total expenditure over the 10 years to $110 billion, which is just an extraordinary amount of money given that it was only $50 billion when we first came to government. Importantly, this additional money, $9.7 billion, is nearly all in this year and next year for projects which can get going almost immediately—certainly over the next 18 months—because the objective of these projects is not only to build critically needed infrastructure but also to support jobs. It will support 30,000 jobs in the process. The Deputy Prime Minister and I worked very closely with state and territory government leaders to determine the parameters of which projects would be supported, knowing that they could assure us that those projects could get going quickly. In addition, we have got $1.5 billion going towards local councils. Local councils can get projects going quite quickly using local contractors and local businesses, and that means local jobs in every community across Australia.

Madam Deputy Speaker, in my last minute allow me to address the final part of my portfolio responsibilities, the cities side. In this budget, we announced the Perth City Deal, which is just another of the city deals that we have announced. It's one which we've worked very closely with the McGowan government on, particularly over the last 12 months, and its central design is to try to revitalise the CBD of Perth and make it more vibrant, safer, a greater cultural hub, a students' hub and a place for people to live, work and play. We've made a significant contribution to that city deal. It will be delivered over the next five to 10 years and, I think, will transform the Perth CBD.

So it is a very significant budget, across population, across infrastructure and across the cities part of my portfolio. I'm happy to come back to the Leppington issue in future considerations.

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