Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

And, geez, don't they hate being reminded of it! The infrastructure program under the coalition government was full of backed-up projects that were announced without the support of states or territories, were poorly scoped, were underfunded and couldn't be delivered because there weren't the tradespeople to build them. And why? Simply to win votes. The infrastructure program of the coalition government was undeliverable and spiralling out of control, having blown out from 150 projects to almost 800 projects. The previous government got addicted to press releases and neglected the hard work of actually building infrastructure. What do we remember about the last government? It was all announcement, no delivery. It was a government that made investment decisions on the basis of colour-coded spreadsheets. Even now, they still boast about it.

One of the things that separates our government from those opposite is that when we make a promise on infrastructure you can actually believe it. That's because, as many Australians have observed—