Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Western Australia) | Link to this | Hansard source

Every time this government gives something, it takes something away. You only need to look at the Perth City Deal to see the absolute hypocrisy of this government. I look at the very welcome investment in the ECU Perth city campus as a classic example. The Prime Minister flew to my state the other week to announce he was giving more money to build the ECU city campus. It'll be a great shiny new building. I welcome it. But what he failed to mention was that the students who go to that campus are going to pay $107,000 for their university degrees. What he also failed to mention is that, while he's giving money to the ECU city campus on the one hand, he cut higher education funding by 5.4 per cent in Tuesday night's budget.

This give-and-then-take approach of this Prime Minister is also seen in the upgrades that are being invested in for the Perth Concert Hall. The Perth City Deal was promised by Prime Minister Turnbull in 2016. In 2016 they promised this. They've finally found the money for it. None of the projects are finished, although that wouldn't be a shock to anyone who has watched the activities of the Prime Minister over the last few years—all announcement, no delivery. When you look at the Perth Concert Hall, there's a welcome investment to improve this piece of architecture, but what have they done to the artists of Perth over the last two years? I worked with my friend the member for Macnamara on the communications and arts committee, when we looked at the absolute devastation of the arts community in Perth. The government denied them JobKeeper, denied them any real support, and so again we'll have a shiny building, but the artists are the ones that suffer because of this government's policies.

Then we've got the boomerang bridge which the Prime Minister announced in Perth the other week—a welcome bridge connecting cyclists and pedestrians from Victoria Park across the Swan River to Perth. But this bridge stops at Heirisson Island. If you know anything about what Main Roads Western Australia have told us about what's going to happen to Heirisson Island if we do not take action on climate change, you'd know that Heirisson Island will be under water. We're building a bridge to an island that, because of the cuts to funding for climate action in this budget, will be under water. It's absolute hypocrisy.

And then we get to this latest budget. Under this budget, the people of Perth are $1,466 worse off. They can have no assurance that anything that this government does is ethical or with integrity because there was no anticorruption commission funding. There's nothing to lower the cost of child care, nothing to address dodgy labour hire, nothing to drive down the costs of electricity, nothing to fix our broken aged-care system, but $3 billion in secret cuts. The Perth City Deal is undercut by a 'Perth shitty deal'.