CATHERINE KING – TRANSCRIPT – DOORSTOP INTERVIEW – PARLIAMENT HOUSE, CANBERRA – MONDAY, 10 MAY 2021

SUBJECT: Morrison Government’s latest infrastructure announcements. 

CATHERINE KING, SHADOW MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORT AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: Today, yet again, we’ve got an announcement from the government around infrastructure. This government, every time it announces infrastructure projects you have to look at the fine print. What we see again is a government that has spent almost $7 billion less over its term than it promised. $7 billion worth of projects that it has promised to deliver to the electorates across the community that it has failed to spend. It is a glossy pamphlet again that we see from this government on the eve of the Budget coming out. One of the things that we see in the infrastructure program is that they’re spending another $90 million on their Commuter Car Parks. This is a fund that the government announced several budgets ago, but of which only one car park has actually been completed out of the 67 they’ve promised. Only three are under construction. What we also see from this announcement today is that there are a number of projects that have been announced requiring further money because they’ve been so delayed by this government. This is a government that is all about announcement when it comes to infrastructure and not about the delivery. Much of the money, it’s not in the budget, it’s actually several years away. So, for example, the intermodal hub that they’ve announced in Victoria, no location announced for it, it won’t be built until 2027. We know as we come out of COVID that we need to get jobs into communities today. The government has no plan to tie this infrastructure money to local procurement. Nor does it have any plans to tie this money to increasing the number of apprenticeships in this country. If we’re going to have a recovery that is worthy of the name, we should be building back better. We don’t need more empty promises from this government, we need them to actually deliver on the promises that they’ve already made. Happy to take questions.

JOURNALIST: When you talk about that they’ve spent less, aren’t we talking about delays though? I think delays because of things like regulation and green tape and things like that, the government has said is such a problem over the last few years and it’s trying to fix. Isn’t it a delay and not less? 

KING: No, not at all. I mean, what we’ve seen in every single Budget, it’s been on average $1.2 billion that that they’ve spent less than they promised. $1.7 billion in fact in the last Budget. But what we see is a government that doesn’t consult properly over those projects so there’s Commuter Car Parks, for example, they’ve announced commuter car parks where there is absolutely no land available for a car park. Like absolutely no possibility that they’re ever going to build, like Balaclava for example. They haven’t actually done the work beforehand to see whether some of those projects are viable. Again, they’ve also promised things like Roe 8 in Perth, they’ve continued to keep that on the table, which state governments are never going to build. So it’s again, all announcement and no actual delivery. 

JOURNALIST: So, should they be spending less on infrastructure or what?

KING: What they should actually be doing is delivering on their promises. If you’re going to say you’re going to build a road, like Captain Cook highway in Queensland, then you should actually deliver on building that road. We see more and more headlines, they’re all about getting the headline, making the story look good, but communities are sick of it. They actually just want this fixed, they want their roads built. There’s been very little money in this budget spent on public transport I think on one project on light rail. People are crying out for increases in light rail, improvements in regional rail. We also see Queensland being substantially short changed. We see the Queensland Minister today tweeting that in fact he believes that Queensland’s been duded it in this package. So again, you’d say to the government, if you’ve got an infrastructure program that is worthy of recovery, what you want to do is build it back better. What you don’t want to do is continue to over-promise and completely and utterly under-deliver. 

JOURNALIST: So then my next question, [unclear] is Labour going to have any announcements around public transport specifically?

KING: We’ll certainly have an infrastructure package that is actually about improving the capacity of our public transport systems, improving the capacity of our roads but also concentrating on getting as many jobs as possible into local communities. We’ve already announced our procurement policies, that the billions of dollars that the Commonwealth spends will be attached to local procurement plans. We’ve also announced that we are expecting that in those major infrastructure projects that they will also be linked to the hiring of new apprentices. we have lost hundreds and hundreds of apprentices and trades people that we desperately need in this recovery because this government has had its eye off the ball.  Thanks everyone. 

ENDS