Speech
Australian Financial Review Infrastructure Summit
Senator the Hon Bridget McKenzie
Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development
Nationals Leader in the Senate
Sofitel Sydney Wentworth
November 11, 2024
Good morning.
It is great to be at the AFR Infrastructure Summit once again.
Amid the hyperbole and the noise of the US campaign, one slogan actually stood out from last week, and that was whether Americans were better off after four years of the Biden administration.
Now, the Coalition has been asking that question of Australians for a long time before it became a function of the US election, because an even larger fall in people’s living standards has occurred in such a short span of time under the Albanese government.
We are very different from the United States, most notably our electoral system, the compulsory and preferential voting that scoots a political debate into the sensible centre rather than the extremes of left and right.
But in terms of the impact of the economy on people’s lives, we are exactly the same.
The immigration issue is different here, too.
We have, to some degree, a bipartisan approach to the economics of migration. We have a de facto population policy whereby we agree that immigration is important to the economic growth of our nation.
But in the last couple of years, that compact with the Australian people has snapped.
It’s not just about the numbers, it’s also about the makeup of migration.
And Labor has proved itself completely inept on the issue of visa management.
The post Covid surge combined with the Albanese government’s laissez-faire immigration policy, and let’s face it, it was much more laissez than it was fair.
[Thank you, thank you, those that got the joke.]
But it is actually making real people’s daily lives worse, increasing traffic congestion and hospital waiting lists.
That is the reality in our suburbs, far from the Sofitel and our regional capitals, that Australians are struggling with each and every day.
Who decides whether Australia has an immigration policy? And who decides the criteria for that policy?
It is not the young couple struggling to buy their first home, making the choice between starting a family or hocking themselves with a lazy million-dollar mortgage.
It’s not the low-income earner who’s trying to get their first foot in the door to the housing market by finding an affordable place to rent. It’s the big universities.
It is big business, big bureaucracy and big unions.
It suits bureaucrats, particularly those in Treasury, because it masks what every economist knows is a serious issue of declining productivity with an ever-increasing GDP., so they can smugly sit there and talk about our increase in GDP whilst productivity ends up in the toilet, and the daily lived experience of Australians is being made tougher.
It suits universities that have been transformed from pure education centres to business enterprises in order to survive, who are happy to keep the rising revenue stream in order to maintain their growth.
It suits many big businesses who see immigration as a cheaper, faster alternative to seriously engaging with educating and training domestic students in order to have skilled local labour.
And finally, it suits big unions who are happily manipulating the skills immigration list to wave in yoga teachers and dog groomers, meanwhile keeping out skilled construction workers that are so critical to get our housing sector going, our public project pipeline affordable, that is the result of letting the ACTU get its hands on our skilled migration.
This is a discussion we have to have as a nation.
We need skilled workers.
We must maintain our humanitarian commitment as one of the leading nations in the world to welcome refugees.
In my responsibility as Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, we have to tackle both the cost of living issues and the overhang of this rapid immigration rise.
Tackling the cost of living by bringing the cost of transport down, through increasing competition, not increasing regulation.
And John’s (NSW Minister for Roads John Graham) commentary earlier goes to the heart of, again, the lived experience of people in our congested suburbs being able to afford to get to work in a country like Australia.
We’ve seen over 10% increase in transport costs this year to June.
So, this is absolutely impacting household budgets.
The cost of moving people and products on our trucks, our planes, through our ports, needs to cost less money and cost less time. In my time as Shadow Minister, hats off to all the transport and freight logistics people I’ve been able to meet but particularly our ports, the unsung heroes of actually getting parcels to front doors, supermarket shelves filled, etc.
We need to make it easier and less costly.
We need to increase productivity and not add layers of red tape. We want to decrease the cost of construction as a Coalition by decreasing the cost of corruption on building sites and on public projects.
We know construction costs are still rising rapidly and that is of the huge jump of an increase of 40% in recent years.
Looking across the infrastructure portfolio it’s hard to point to any achievement of the Labor Government in two and a half years.
Now I wish the Minister was here so that she could actually tell you, the stakeholders in her portfolio, what they have done at the peak infrastructure summit of this country with all the movers and shakers in the room but unfortunately, Minister King had something else on.
So, it’s left to me to point out what they haven’t done.
It’s not my job to point out what they have done, I’m the Shadow Minister, I’m hunting for that job.
$27.8 billion worth of road and rail infrastructure project cancellations and delays while our capital cities are becoming coming congested under the burden of more than one million additional migrants.
Aviation, we’ve seen a 50% increase in airfares, two airlines servicing the regions into administration.
Maritime strategic fleet, or as I like to call it, Albo’s Armada, shrunk to three vessels, none of which will be even contracted to be built, let alone start construction by the time of the election.
High speed rail, we’ve got a handful of holes drilled into the ground, that’s about it.
Far from capitalising on a period of wall-to-wall Labor governments across the mainland, the Prime Minister has failed to drive reform in his most beloved of portfolios.
Despite undertaken two reviews, the Albanese Government has no coherent vision for the infrastructure our cities and indeed our nation needs, not just to the next election, but, as I said earlier, to the decades beyond.
There’s no more glaring evidence of their recklessness towards funding infrastructure than the $2.2 billion that’s sitting on the budget for Suburban Rail Loop in Melbourne.
It’s a $217 Billion project which remains unfunded and for which federal Labor has signed up Australian taxpayers for despite not having received a business case.
And just yesterday the Premier of Victoria announced that the state had signed taxpayers up for another $1.7 billion to get a tunnel going, I think, from Glen Waverley to Box Hill.
They keep drilling, baby drilling, meanwhile, they have no idea where the funding is coming from.
But at some point, as we see so often in this Federation, hungry, desperate Premier’s, knock on Federal Government’s doors to bail them out. And we’ve seen it in successive budgets under this Government.
The new funding into infrastructure, lying in federal budgets over the last three budgets, hasn’t been for new projects, it’s been to cover cost blowouts by state governments, billions and billions and billions of dollars.
There’s no evidence the Albanese Government has sought to work with States to minimise the cost pressures pushing up construction costs.
It’s as if you can knock on their door, they’ll sign the cheque, and you just need to go away and keep building irrespective of the cost to both state and federal taxpayers.
Federal Labor is driving a green construction agenda alongside the rush to renewables, which if it comes to fruition, will result increased cost of construction inputs through green steel and green concrete.
I’d like to ask any tenderers in the room today if you are costing in your tenders in the next, I don’t know, five years, putting green steel and green concrete into public infrastructure projects.
Not a lot of hands going up, you know why, because It’s not real, yet.
And so, we chase this fantasy and meanwhile drive up the cost of construction, imagining that it’s somehow going to become a reality.
I have a science degree; I prefer to deal in rational facts not wish lists.
The state and federal government’s pro-union industrial relations agenda has seen the CFMEU let off the chain resulting in increases of cost of living projects by 30%, that is real.
We don’t like to talk about it, state governments don’t like to do anything about it, but it is real.
And it means that the infrastructure we need built in our congested in cities and suburbs doesn’t get built.
We kick the timelines out because we can’t afford the price tag, and that means suburbs are waiting to have the roads actually duplicated, the critical rail projects delivered, because we can’t afford it.
Our approach as the Coalition will be different.
We want to make our cities liveable again by investing in the infrastructure we need to unlock new housing developments.
We’ll restore the aspiration for young families to be able to own their own home.
We’re investing $5 billion to unlock 500,000 new homes, not by getting state governments to build them, getting builders to build them, but actually investing in the things that we’ve heard from industry that are stopping those housing blocks being unlocked.
Simple things, not sexy, that’s why ministers don’t like to talk about them.
Things like power, water, sewerage, things that everybody thinks are just business as usual but over decades have become unable to be afforded.
And therefore, you’ve got thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of housing blocks ready for release, if but for a $4.2 million road.
If but for the state electricity company not taking two years to get the power on.
Sounds simple.
It is, and so will be part of our basic agenda.
That’s exactly what we’ll be focusing on.
My priority if I have the great privilege to be the infrastructure minister following the next election will be to resolve the impasse and the costly blockages, and states and territories to reduce the cost of construction.
We heard the State Minister talk about looking at contractual arrangements.
Well, that’s exactly what we’ll be doing when it comes to the national partnership grants.
Because I don’t believe the federal taxpayer should be funding projects where the CFMEU gets a sweetheart deal for the tier waste.
We actually need to make sure we’re investing in best value for money, and that means workers get good wages, long term careers in the construction industry but that we also can afford to build things our communities need in order to thrive.
And that our freight task needs to see.
I want to make sure that right now the Commonwealth is actually on the hook for any state government blowouts.
All care and no responsibility, quite literally in these funding agreements.
And that is something I will be absolutely looking at.
We’ll be looking at the cost of state environmental regulation on construction projects. The states will not feel pressure to reduce regulatory costs on the cost of construction as long as the Commonwealth is willing to subsidise the cost, why would you? Why would you?
We will reduce congestion.
We will recognise the principles that infrastructure investments are intended to make life better for people, not just be a way of keeping bureaucrats in the jobs and construction companies going.
Actually, we need to serve the people.
We’ll seek to partner with the states and the private sector to make sure our pipeline delivers for our whole country.
And I look forward to your questions.
Thank you.