Ben Small (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Electoral Matters) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of my electorates and indeed the south-west corner of Western Australia to express our profound disappointment at being ignored and left completely high and dry by the Labor budget, a budget of betrayal built on lies, higher taxes, higher debt, more migrants and less housing. We put forward very sensibly to government some economically and productive infrastructure investment proposals, which included the Busselton Margaret River Airport, which, from humble beginnings as a tin shed, now hosts more than 200,000 passenger movements a year. These are not only for the recreational and tourism sectors, with direct flights to Melbourne and Sydney, but importantly also for the some 5,000-plus FIFO workers in the south-west who leave their families and leave our community to travel to the far north of Western Australia to work for weeks at a time in the iron ore mines that generate billions of dollars for the Commonwealth and for the state of Western Australia.

After generating the billions of dollars of royalties for our country, those hardworking FIFO folks should be rewarded with the small and modest investment that is upgrading the Busselton Margaret River Airport. At the current state of play, there are people waiting to board a flight who can't even clear security because the cleared zone is so small that just two flights at once means that there's insufficient standing room for people to clear security. That's how parlous the situation has become, and it isn't exactly the sort of world-class experience that you'd hope for the people who travel to Margaret River for a premium tourism experience, who come and experience the very best of Western Australia's wine industry, not to mention the breathtaking scenery, the pristine beaches and the iconic karri forests of the south-west. That was just one humble ask in this budget that was completely ignored.

WA's share of infrastructure funding has fallen to a seemingly all-time low. I can't help but think this is smoke and mirrors from a government that says, on the one hand, it is committed to Western Australia's GST deal, but, on the other, is pulling funding from every program in the infrastructure portfolio that would otherwise be put into Western Australian projects. We'll continue to call it out and we'll continue to bang the drum for what is a small and sensible investment that would diversify the local economy in the south-west of Western Australia and ensure that this mining boom isn't wasted once again.

See this speech in context