Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure for me to rise and speak on the Infrastructure Australia Amendment Bill 2013. I have known many trainspotters who have a fascination for rail and care about it, and I am thinking of a great friend of our family—my parents were Irish immigrants—Neville Wootton, who would be very pleased to know that his name is being recorded in this place today. He was a fan of the trains and did not live far from Toongabbie station.

An investment in rail and urban infrastructure in terms of rail is an absolutely vital part of our nation's mix moving forward. I second the comments of my colleague here in the chamber, Senator Alex Gallacher, who just made some points about the critical nature of Infrastructure Australia in making sure that that complex and important mix of different types of infrastructure build is constantly considered in a way that advances the entire nation.

But despite Uncle Nev's best efforts to interest me in rail, I have to put on the record that I am the daughter of a road builder; I am the sister of many road builders. And at this time of the evening—it is mid-winter—the lights will be off. Unless there is some emergency on a job and they have gone out and hired lights, probably from Camden Hire or some other agency that they use—another small business industry—they will be on their way home now, having participated in building the roads that will be a vital part of how our community moves around here in this state of New South Wales.

I grew up to be very proud of being a part of something that is national. I cannot tell you the pride that my father felt as an Irish immigrant with a very limited education but a great heart for work and a great interest in machinery. He shared with us his vision for what Australia could be when he spoke about his work on building the Bradfield Highway when he worked for Abignano. These sorts of things—this connection with building this country—is a powerful part of our sense of ourselves. Anyone who looks at the Harbour Bridge, whether it is celebrating Australia Day or celebrating New Year's Eve, anywhere around the world, can see that this is a country that had a vision for something powerful in terms of what infrastructure could deliver in advancing our nation.

What concerns me about the legislation that was put forward and is in such need of amendment is that it reveals a government that is backward-looking and miserly in its vision for this country, that is willing to carve out an entire sector of rail and that simply has not understood the way in which infrastructure captures the imagination of Australian people. The Prime Minister is playing at the edges, trying to claim the title of infrastructure Prime Minister. That is only authentic if you are actually going to outdeliver, outspend and outvision anybody who has done it before, and that is certainly not the case in what this Prime Minister is attempting to do, as revealed in this piece of legislation.

What concerns me particularly at this point in time is that infrastructure, under the piece of legislation that the government has put forward, is at risk of becoming a political plaything once again should this bill pass in its current form. Labor de-linked the infrastructure cycle from the electoral cycle. That was a very significant change. Right now we run the risk of the Abbott government returning us to the bad old days of pork barrelling, with Australians in Labor seats or Liberal seats or Nationals seats being left behind. But I fear that the whole construction of this piece of legislation is really to advantage the Liberal seats, even at the cost of the Nats. We are seeing that over and over in piece after piece of legislation coming through the Senate here in terms of education and health, as well now as infrastructure. Infrastructure decisions should not bend to political expediency. Infrastructure decisions should be blind to the electorate they fall in. If done correctly, good infrastructure decision making and investment will benefit every single Australian and not just those in the electorates in which they are funded and located.

It can be difficult for governments to overlook the benefits that may flow from such large expenditure, and we have seen that failure to have a vision for what infrastructure spending can do. We need to preserve this system that was instituted in the last parliament that clearly broke with former bad habits and established a transparent process to create a body which would auspice and determine in the national interest what is best for infrastructure—that body being Infrastructure Australia.

The hallmark of the previous Labor government was delivering nation-building infrastructure. We delivered what the Howard Liberal government refused to build for 11 years. I am just going to refer to the shadow minister's comments on Tuesday, 10 December, when he went through a list of some of the places that were the beneficiaries of the recommendations of Infrastructure Australia. I note many of my colleagues have made comments about the benefits for the electorate of the Leader of the Nationals in the other place, Warren Truss. He has benefited from many of these decisions. This is what the shadow minister, Anthony Albanese, said:

Thanks to the recommendations of Infrastructure Australia, here are some of the projects that the previous Labor government delivered: the Hunter Expressway … major upgrading of the Pacific Highway, worth $7.9 billion, through works including the Bulahdelah Bypass, the Kempsey Bypass and the Ballina Bypass, all opened by Labor; and the Bruce Highway, with funding of $5.7 billion, including work on what the now transport minister describes as the worst road in Australia, the Cooroy to Curra section of the Bruce Highway.

He went on to say:

Minister Truss would know that because it is in his electorate. He just did not fix it during the 12 years in which he was part of the government.

That is the sad reality of a failure to have looked at the projects that needed funding and to have funded them during that period of great mining benefit to the country when we had money coming in. The Howard government simply lacked the vision and it certainly lacked to the structures to make powerful recommendations about the infrastructure that should have moved forward at that time in the national interest.

We came into government and removed the bottlenecks that the infrastructure-averse Liberal government would not. We did it to secure the productivity gains that drive jobs growth and we did it because we know that you have to invest in roads, ports, railways and airports. When in government it seems the Liberal Party just do not get this. They have an indelible belief that it should just happen and the private sector will make it happen, no questions asked. Or there is the alternative of grabbing the dollars and stuffing them into seats for sheer electoral advantage—the most disgraceful and uncompromising abuse of the power of government.

On this side of the chamber we know that the federal government needs to take a lead in making sure we have a unified and strategic vision about how we build our nation. To do that, Labor created Infrastructure Australia, which is the agency that is being debated at the heart of this piece of legislation. To be the holder of this vision, to remove the politics from these decisions and to do what is in the best interests of the nation is exactly what Infrastructure Australia was created to do and it is exactly what it has done. Let me just restate that: Infrastructure Australia was created to do exactly what we wanted in terms of having a region-blind and electorate-blind vision for advancing Australia's interests. It delivered exactly that.

But within a heartbeat of returning to government the coalition got on those Treasury benches and immediately wanted to take the reins and ride this horse of advantage into its own electorates. It seems that the coalition just cannot help itself except to see dollars in infrastructure as a place from which it can pork barrel. It wants to get rid of an independent body that provides expert advice and overturn a body, Infrastructure Australia, that was especially established to deliver an holistic approach. Instead the coalition just wants to dismantle it and feel free to cherry-pick projects that suit its political will. It is back to the bad old days when infrastructure was not an integrated process but simply a recipe for pork-barrelling.

This bill, without amendment, gives the government complete power and zero transparency. That is not even just on the big decisions. They also in this bill seek to micromanage time frames and the scope of audits and evaluations. The Labor Party will absolutely oppose this shift from transparency to a rule of darkness, hiddenness and uncertainty that smacks of self-interest and distortion of the national interest.

Infrastructure Australia deals with matters that should be open to scrutiny so that the people of Australia can see how the board works and see the projects of merit that it supports and advocates for. It is clear from the legislation it put forward that the coalition wants to weaken Infrastructure Australia by increasing the power of the minister to interfere in Infrastructure Australia's own evaluation processes. This government wants to be able to order infrastructure Australia to evaluate particular projects nominated by the minister. Where is the transparency in that? The independent body of Infrastructure Australia should remain independent in the national interest. That is why we will oppose a piece of legislation that seeks to change that unless we have significant amendments to deal with the issues that I have raised.

Along with many of the other very positive aspects of Infrastructure Australia, the government proposes to scrap the tax loss concessions introduced by the Labor government in the 2012 budget. Labor's amendments to these bills will ensure that Infrastructure Australia retains the power to approve tax concessions for private sector co-investment in nationally significant infrastructure projects. This reform aims to increase private sector involvement in major projects. The government proposed that this role be undertaken by a delegate of the minister. Once again, instead of keeping it open and transparent, the government is pulling it back into the minister's realm so that, from on high, some lord, knight or elevated person of the realm can direct the traffic of Australia's infrastructure spending to their own gain and advantage. We cannot go back to that kind of a world.

Sitting suspended from 18:30 to 19:30

Before the break I was speaking to the Infrastructure Australia Amendment Bill 2013 and pointing out some of the major problems of the coalition's approach to Infrastructure Australia—including the reduction in transparency with a return to the days where ministers can skew the process towards their own pet projects—and the concerns I have about undoing the fantastic transparency gains and the practical and genuine gains for the country of having a vision for infrastructure that extends beyond the boundaries of the immediate and the foreseeable future and beyond the boundaries that can be constructed around individual seats and people's particular interests. I put on the record a little earlier my particular interest in roads, but it is rail that matters, and ports. All forms of infrastructure, and their integration, are vital to the developers of the Australian nation.

I am very concerned that this is a government that seems to have constructed for itself a very poorly defined set of rights around Infrastructure Australia, and such a poorly defined set of rights makes it very easy to sack people. They are giving themselves the power to dispose of advisers whose advice does not suit their political line. In addition to a failure to have transparency, they have constructed a model where they can get rid of advice that does not suit pork-barrelling of the kind that we saw the last time John Howard was in office. I am deeply concerned about the bill's provisions for allowing the Minister for Infrastructure and Regional Development to order Infrastructure Australia not to consider classes of infrastructure when it assesses the relative merits of infrastructure projects. The changes the coalition is seeking to what Infrastructure Australia was doing very well under the former Labor government will reduce transparency and take us a long way backwards.

The federal government has explicitly ruled out funding for urban public transport projects such as the Melbourne Metro, Brisbane Cross River Rail, Perth light rail and Airport Link, and the Tonsley Park rail upgrade in Adelaide. To overtly signal that you are going to cut an entire section out of the development of Australia's infrastructure, to allow these changes to public transport to be excluded from Infrastructure Australia's scope, can only be seen as a negative and destructive view of the way complex and sophisticated infrastructure and infrastructure in the 21st century needs to be considered in order to advance the nation's interests.

For the coalition government to sit there and give themselves powers to exclude, for no good reason, an entire class of infrastructure can only lead to one thing—gaping holes, massive gaps, in the infrastructure that Australia will need in the future. We have seen the legacy of that from the Howard era, when we had a failure to invest in infrastructure that Labor had to make up for when we got back in. Under the coalition's proposal, expensive projects will be excluded, inconvenient projects will be excluded and projects against Liberal priorities will be excluded. This is not how any good governance model should operate, and it is certainly not the way to build a nation.

Labor's amendments to this bill are very important because they will allow infrastructure experts in Infrastructure Australia to be free to be the experts that they are—they will not have to take advice from a minister who may or may not have some family association with road-building, to which I have already owned up earlier in my speech. The reality is that the independence of Infrastructure Australia is critical to its success and our success as a nation. The problem is further exacerbated by the type of legislation this government have put before us because in the development of their legislation they did not listen to experts. In contrast, we have listened to very important stakeholders like the Business Council of Australia. They might know a few things about building infrastructure for the nation. There was also the Tourism & Transport Forum, the Urban Development Institute, public transport organisations such as the Moving People 2030 coalition—and Infrastructure Australia itself. All have called for enhancements to Infrastructure Australia, but not with additional powers for the minister to shape and interfere with the advice the government and the community will receive.

The explanatory notes for this bill state that the bill will strengthen the role of Infrastructure Australia as an independent, transparent and expert advisory body through a change in its governance structure and through better clarification of its functions. The reality is that the minister opposed the creation of Infrastructure Australia and in this bill he now seeks to control it if it has bolted too far and he cannot completely get rid of it. He is attempting to weaken its independence by reducing scrutiny and independent advice—a backward move. This bill in its current form does exactly the opposite of what the minister is claiming it will do. Why would we be surprised to see that this is a government making an art form of saying one thing and doing another? I am hoping he is doing this because he does not understand the bill rather than because he is being purposefully deceptive, but people will have to make up their own minds about what is going on with this government that is hiding more and more from the Australian people.

Infrastructure planning is about the future—it is about the nation, it is about the community, and we want to build it. For that aim to be realised, a government needs a vision. Cutting, limiting, controlling and removing independent advice is not the sort of policy that is going to deliver a vision of anything good for this country. Under Labor, Infrastructure Australia conducted the first ever national audit of infrastructure needs. Anthony Albanese was, surprisingly and remarkably, the first minister for infrastructure in Australia. Can you believe we had been so unable to see the need for these measures? Since then we have seen an incredible delivery of investment in Australia and so much of our country has changed. We restored national leadership, we established Infrastructure Australia and we got on with funding the vital projects that changed this nation. Compared with the last full year of the Howard government in 2006-07, annual infrastructure spending under Labor in real terms was up by 50 per cent in the year 2011-12. Total public and private infrastructure spending over federal Labor's first five years in office was almost $250 billion—almost 70 per cent greater in real terms than the $150 billion spent during the last five years of the Howard government.

There is a massive contrast with a limited, miserly and contained version of Australia that those opposite are seeking to force on this country, and the legislation as put by the government needs massive change. Labor believe in the vision of Australia—one that is brought about by transparency and openness. The coalition do not know that. They need to pay attention to our amendments and get on with doing a better job for this country. (Time expired)