Speeches

Infrastructure and Population Challenges

Thursday 26th November 2009

This has been the longest day. In parliamentary terms it is in its 131st hour, so it has indeed been a very, very long day—and it has been an extraordinary day. On indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, can I just pass on my congratulations to our new leader, Tony Abbott, the member for Warringah. I wish him all the best. We will be fighting hard with him, because this will be a big fight. I also place on record my deep and sincere thanks to Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, also a dear friend, and I wish him all the very best at this time. He showed tremendous grace today, and I commend him for that. So we go forward, choosing clearly to give the planet, but not Kevin Rudd, the benefit of the doubt.

The Trade Practices Amendment (Infrastructure Access) Bill 2009 is a very important piece of reform which the coalition supports. This bill is part of a process of reform that has been going on for almost two decades and it adds to the work of successive governments. In our island continent, how we plan, build and operate our infrastructure to serve the needs of our people and their industries will be, I believe, our biggest challenge during the time I hope to serve in this parliament. Today we have an unexpected new framework against which all of our infrastructure decisions must be taken. Treasury’s revised forecast that Australia will be home to 35 million people by 2049 is a profound and challenging statistic, one that we need to get our heads around, and we must frame policy in this place across many different areas as we go forward.

I believe there is genuine and understandable concern in our community about how we will cope with this number of people and what we need to do to cope with this number of people, with a national survey published just two weeks ago revealing that four in 10 Australians are now worried about whether the infrastructure, the services and the various other things that we provide to sustain the quality of life in this country can service that population. These are fair questions, these are honest questions, and they are questions we must wrestle with in this parliament and in our policies.

Growth is a good thing—growth is a very good thing—and we need to also acknowledge that as we go forward in this debate. Our solution for dealing with growth is effective action now to encourage infrastructure provision that will meet our transport, education and health needs, and boost our export industries. There is no other option; we simply must achieve infrastructure resources that deliver new productivity gains and new competitiveness in our global markets if we are going to be able to provide and sustain the quality of life that we enjoy today and I am sure we hope future generations will enjoy.

The challenges that sit under this very complex policy conundrum relate to how we are going to deal with some very important issues, and they are as follows: we have the challenge of a shortfall of 200,000 dwellings in our housing resources, with construction unable to match our immediate growth rates let alone address the backlog; we have the challenge of coal loaders lining up 20, 40 or 50 at a time outside our terminals at Newcastle or Dalrymple Bay, wasting time and money; we have the challenge of a rail system that fails to maximise our productivity, with visionary projects such as the inland railway from Victoria to Queensland being placed on the backburner; we have the challenge of a road network masked by its missing links, not least of which is the F6 freeway extension from Sydney to the New South Wales South Coast and in particular the Illawarra which is the missing link in Sydney’s road system, which those opposite have chosen at both a state and a federal level to ignore time and again; and there are the challenges of public transport systems that need to be able to move a growing population around our cities, particularly when we are looking at having populations of seven million in cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, and a doubling of the population of Brisbane over the period that I have referred to. These are all big challenges, and hit-and-miss announcements of infrastructure upgrades will not deliver on them.

Look no further than hints recently of the opening of the Richmond Air Force base to commercial aircraft, with a complete lack of thought for the absence of adequate road and rail infrastructure to support those aircraft movements. Richmond has been defined as a potential or interim second airport. I know that the residents of that area—having spoken to the now member for Greenway and hopefully next member for Macquarie—have genuine concerns that this short-term second airport will become a long-term second airport. You cannot go and place those sorts of commitments on a local community when the infrastructure is simply not there to support an operation of that kind, let alone deal with the issues that relate to national security matters—how that airport would operate and how it will interface with its very important work, much of which is emergency service and rescue work and things of that nature at that base. That is what our Air Force and armed services are involved in. The infrastructure is currently not there to support that type of arrangement. It is important than when we make decisions about infrastructure they are not made in a slapdash way which only adds further burdens and complicates the problem rather than putting in place a long-term plan that will deliver on what we will need in the future.

A faster growing population must be viewed, as I said, as an opportunity. It is now time that we as a nation took a view on what our population target should be. It is not good enough for this government to simply say, ‘Our population is projected to be 35 million by 2049,’ and that is it. That is a number we need to think about. It is a number that we have to understand in terms of what our infrastructure can support. How are we going to grow our economy over that period of time to support a population of that size? We need to form considered views about that and then ensure that we take the responsible action to deliver on the consequences of our decision. If we say that there is going to be a population of a particular size, then the ...

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