Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think Queenslanders across the great state of Queensland today, tonight, are waking up to this federal Labor government. They're waking up to the absolute hypocrisy of this Labor government. When the current Prime Minister was trying to get the top job, he told Australians that he would be a prime minister for infrastructure. He said: 'Trust me, I've been the infrastructure minister before. I was a great infrastructure minister. I'll be a great prime minister for infrastructure.' Well, that promise rings hollow today, because, earlier today, his infrastructure minister stood up and effectively redesigned the boundaries of how things are going to be funded across this country.

Traditionally—in fact, certainly—while we, the coalition, were in government, we provided funding for projects, particularly on the Bruce Highway, on an 80-20 split. Now this government is saying, 'It's out with the bathwater, and now it's going to be a 50-50 split.' It's really interesting because this 90-day review was announced by the federal government almost 200 days ago and we still don't have an answer as to which projects are going to be cut and which are not. But they are softening Australians up. They're leaking a little bit of information each day. We saw the Treasurer trying to soften the blow on the weekend, on Insiders, talking about the fact that they can't provide funding for all projects. This Labor government is trying to soften the blow of the cuts that are about to come to infrastructure across this country.

I want to concentrate on a couple of these projects on the Sunshine Coast, in my neck of the woods, the electorate of Fisher. The first one, of course, is the heavy passenger rail into Maroochydore from Beerwah station. About 85 per cent of the population of the Sunshine Coast lives on the coast—very different to how it was over a hundred years ago when people lived in the hinterland. Over those more than 100 years, people have moved to the coast. We don't have a railway line on the coast. It beggars belief that we don't, but when we were in government, Ted O'Brien, the member for Fairfax, and I secured federal funding from our government to the tune of $1.6 billion, half the cost we estimated it would cost to build that railway. We didn't get boo from the state Labor government, other than them saying, 'We'll do a review.'

That $1.6 billion, which the state Labor government refused to match, is now potentially facing cuts by this federal Labor government. Whilst we offered to pay 50-50—it was a $3.2 billion project; we got $1.6 billion committed by the former coalition government—the state government refused to accept that $1.6 billion. They refused to enter into an arrangement, to start the work, to start the design and to even commit to it.

The same applies to the $160 million that we got for the Mooloolah River Interchange. For both of those projects, the former federal government didn't need to put a cent towards it, but the state Queensland Labor government are so hopeless that we were having to put in a lot of money to help fund their infrastructure projects. When you come to the great state of Queensland and you look at the front or the side of a Queensland rail train, you'll see QR—you don't see CR—for Queensland Rail. We didn't need to put a penny to either of those projects, including the Mooloolah River Interchange, but we offered to pay half. Now what we find is that the federal government is not only looking to cut billions of dollars of infrastructure projects around this country; they are now saying: 'We're going to change the rules. The former government was prepared to pay 80 per cent for a lot of these projects, particularly on the Bruce Highway, on Highway 1, and we're going to cut that back to 50 per cent.' You know what's going to happen, don't you? The state government, because they are so broke and they are so inept, will scale down—

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