Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I want to provide the House with an important update when it comes to housing policy and Tasmania. Many of my constituents know how hard it is to get a foot in the door of the housing market. This is replicated right across the country. For some reason, our Tasmanian state government decided not to join up to the national shared equity scheme, Help to Buy. So I and my other Tasmanian colleagues have been on a mission to shame them into joining up. The deadline was 1 March, and they hadn't signed up by then. We did a couple of events. We wrote to them. We did some media. Finally, they say that they will now join the national scheme.

Whilst this is very welcome news, it means that Tasmanians have missed out on guaranteed places for this current financial year for the shared equity scheme. One of the state government's reasonings was, 'Well, we've got a state scheme.' We wondered: why not give people options and the two can run side by side? But it is welcome news. Importantly, I want to call on the Tasmanian state government to actually legislate and get this done. They first promised it 2½ years ago. The scheme has now been up and running since December, and all we've got now is a promise. Tasmanians know, of course, that the Tasmanian state government says plenty and then doesn't deliver.

On that note, I continue to raise with the Tasmanian state government the lack of action on a range of infrastructure projects in my electorate. I'm getting correspondence about it on a regular basis, and I keep writing and talking to the Tasmanian state government. One of these projects includes safety upgrades on the Tasman Bridge—tens of millions of dollars. I have been calling for these safety upgrades for more than a decade, and the Tasmanian state government has been very slow to action this. They did do some preparatory work in January, so I hope that they're not too far away.

Then, of course, there's the Mornington Roundabout, which I committed to at the last election—actually, the one before! The Tasmanian state government, at their last state election, also said that they would commit to it, and they've put $20 million towards it to go with the $80 million from the federal government. This is to remove a roundabout, improve the intersection and build some ramps. But, again, they have—it's on their website—dragged out that timeline further, and it has not been happening. The Algona Road-Channel Highway project has over $60 million committed to it; again, there are no commitments from the state government on getting that done. Dates keep slipping in relation to projects.

What we actually need to see is some action. In relation to the South Arm Highway, a traffic management system is needed around Lauderdale Primary School, a significant school in my electorate. Again, the Tasmanian community and the Lauderdale school community have been waiting a very long time for this. My big message here today is that the federal government keeps stepping up to the plate and providing funding, but the Tasmanian state government doesn't keep delivering, and we need them to deliver for my electorate and for Tasmania.

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