Tanya Plibersek, Subject/s: Ebola; Climate Change.

THE HON TANYA PLIBERSEK MP

DEPUTY LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

SHADOW MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
MEMBER FOR SYDNEY

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
TELEVISION INTERVIEW
ABC NEWS 24, CAPITAL HILL
FRIDAY, 31 OCTOBER 2014


JULIE DOYLE, PRESENTER: The Federal Opposition is continuing to keep the pressure on the Government over its response to the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Labor maintains the Government should send Australian health care workers to West Africa but the Government won’t agree while there’s no suitable arrangement to treat any workers who become infected. The Deputy Opposition Leader, Tanya Plibersek, has been in the United States this week for meetings with Government officials. She joined me from New York a little earlier.
TANYA PLIBERSEK, DEPUTY OPPOSITION LEADER: In all of the conversations I have had including with UN representatives today, with White House personnel, department personnel and the Ebola Coordinator – it is being made very clear that there is an expectation that countries like Australia that have strong health systems, that have personnel that are trained and willing and able to assist would make a greater contribution. Indeed the US ambassador to the United Nations has said very clearly that it’s all very well to sign on to these resolutions but it’s a bit rich then not to send medical staff or provide hospital beds once you’ve made these great pronouncements. I think it’s very clear there is an expectation that countries like Australia should do more.
DOYLE: When she said it’s a bit rich, what kind of language did she use there?
PLIBERSEK: I think the exact words were something like it’s terrific to sign on to resolutions and to compliment countries like the United States and the United Kingdom for the contribution that they’re making but then it’s a problem if you don’t then send docs and beds – I think were the exact words. So there is a clear expectation, the President of the United States has also said on a number of occasions now that what’s really needed is a much greater effort from the international community, particularly in terms of sending personnel.
DOYLE: The United States has been looking at opening a field hospital in West Africa to treat any health workers who get infected. Have you received any update on the progress for that?
PLIBERSEK: Yes, I’ve been told that it’s imminent. It should open in a matter of days, that it will be a facility that would take any medical personnel that were affected, that needed medical treatment. So a lot of doctors and medical personnel will tell you that with a virus like Ebola it is a relatively simple treatment. You need to keep up fluids and nutrition, keep the patient clean and comfortable and you can best do that as close to the point of diagnosis and as close to the time of diagnosis as possible so the establishment of these treatment facilities in-country for medical staff is a very important step. It certainly reduces the need for air evacuation, medivac arrangements, but at the same time as building these hospital facilities in-country, further planning is going on to give greater options for medivac as well.
DOYLE: On that field hospital, have you received any guarantees that any Australian health workers who were in West Africa and got infected would have access to treatment there?
PLIBERSEK: It was made very clear to me that Australian health workers would be absolutely able to use this facility, absolutely welcome there, on an equal basis with the staff of the United States. Now, I believe it’s a 25-bed hospital. You have understand that there are potential scenarios where that hospital is full and someone would have to be transferred. I don’t think in a case like this with a virus that’s spreading as quickly with a situation that is as dire, anybody can give definitive guarantees about anything.
DOYLE: What we’re talking about, though, is Australian staff being treated on the same basis as the nationals of the United States or other countries that are on the ground in West Africa providing this assistance. Given that, do you think that should be enough to satisfy the Australian Government’s concerns about sending healthcare workers?
PLIBERSEK: I think it’s up to the Government to answer what further impediments they see. The first furfy that they raised was this 30-hour evacuation time. Nobody has ever said that Australians who get sick should be flown back to Australia. That would be dangerous. It would be a nonsense to suggest that that is the best way to treat someone who gets sick in West Africa but we now have an increasing number of treatment options including the US field hospital, the UK are building a field hospital. The were some reports the UK may be sending a hospital ship as well. There are increasing numbers of evacuation options available. I think it is now getting to a stage, with this increasing number of options available to treat any Australian staff that get sick, that the Government really is running out of excuses.
DOYLE: Tanya Plibersek, just briefly I want to ask you about domestic politics and we’ve seen the Direct Action policy, the emissions reduction fund, pass through the Senate earlier this morning. From the Opposition’s perspective, are you still committed to taking an Emissions Trading Scheme as a policy to the next election?
PLIBERSEK: Well, we introduced an Emissions Trading Scheme, we backed an Emissions Trading Scheme. You’ve got to understand Direct Action’s a dog of a policy. There’s not an environmentalist or an economist anywhere that will tell you that this will act to reduce carbon emissions. We have always said that you need to put a limit on the amount of pollution and that it makes a lot more sense for big polluters to pay for the pollution that they’re pumping into our environment and for that money to be used as it was under our scheme to compensate people for any change in the cost of living – than for taxpayers to pay big polluters and for there to be no guarantee of an overall environmental benefit. I think this is disappointing to see this dog of a scheme pass through the Senate and we remain committed to real action on climate change not this window dressing.
DOYLE: That means an Emissions Trading Scheme, you’ll face another election with that policy?
PLIBERSEK: Well, we’re yet to make detailed announcements about our policies but we believe that the most sensible way is to put a cap on carbon pollution, have a market mechanism to provide environmental benefit in the cheapest possible way. What you see today is a scheme that gives away billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money during a so-called Budget emergency – as the Government likes to keep pointing out they’ve got no money – giving away billions of dollars to big polluters for potentially no environmental benefit.
DOYLE: Tanya Plibersek, we’ll leave it there. Thank you very much.
PLIBERSEK: Thank you.
ENDS

Tanya Plibersek, SUBJECT/S: Ebola Crisis; Iraq.

THE HON TANYA PLIBERSEK MP

DEPUTY LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION

SHADOW MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

MEMBER FOR SYDNEY

E&OE TRANSCRIPT
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC RADIO NATIONAL BREAKFAST
FRIDAY, 31 OCTOBER 2014



TANYA PLIBERSEK, DEPUTY OPPOSITION LEADER: Hello Fran.
FRAN KELLY, PRESENTER: Tanya Plibersek, has America offered Australia the use of a new 25 bed field hospital that it is apparently about to open in Liberia?
PLIBERSEK: Well of course I don’t know what formal communications have been made between the United States Government and our Government but I can certainly tell you I’ve had very senior meetings here with the State Department, with the United Nations, with representatives of the White House and it was made clear to me that that facility would be made available for health workers not just Australian health workers but health workers of any nationality who are in West Africa fighting Ebola.
KELLY: Can you tell us any more about this field hospital? The Sydney Morning Herald today quotes the US Embassy spokesperson in Canberra saying that a 25 bed field hospital will be provided and it could be open within days. Have you been told the specifics of this field hospital? Has it been mentioned to you?
PLIBERSEK: Yes it has been confirmed to me that it will be open very shortly, that the treatment available will be of a first world standard, that it has been set aside for health workers to give health workers from countries around the world confidence to go to West Africa to fight Ebola. The treatment for Ebola is, in a way, quite basic treatment – you have to keep hydration and nutrition up for the patient, you have to keep them clean and comfortable. And beginning treatment as close as possible to where the diagnosis is made is actually often considered best practice in treating a virus like this.
KELLY: Do you know when this hospital will be open?
PLIBERSEK: I’ve been told very shortly. I haven’t been given a day, but within days.
KELLY: The Abbott Government has so far resisted calls to send Australian health professionals and other teams to West Africa because the Government can’t guarantee treatment for Australians who might get sick with Ebola. In your meetings with Ambassador Nancy Powel, Ebola Coordinator for the State Department did you determine whether or not the US has offered access to that facility to the Australian Government? The Australian Government is aware of it?
PLIBERSEK: Well she made it very clear to me that that treatment facility would be available to health workers of any nationality who are in West Africa working as volunteers fighting Ebola. I can’t answer for specifically what formal communication has been made to the Australian Government but I think the fact that this hospital was under construction was widely known and I certainly have known about it for a number of weeks. I’d be very surprised if the Australian Government hasn’t had specific conversations with the Government of the United States about it.
KELLY: You’ve been meeting with a range of high level people across a range of agencies, one of those is the Managing Director of the World Bank Dr Indrawati. We know that the IMF have been calling for improved contributions from Western countries. Are they calling on Australia to do more in West Africa? What message did you get in these meetings more broadly?
PLIBERSEK: Every meeting I have had, whether it’s been with the World Bank, with the United Nations, with people in the White House or the State Department – it has been made clear to me that there is a very strong view that the United States, the United Kingdom, to a degree France, are bearing most of the responsibility for fighting this outbreak and that there is a disappointment that countries such as Australia are willing to sign on to UN resolutions calling for people to do more, to send equipment, personnel and so on, then simply there is not the follow through. There is a critical window, this virus is doubling its number of infections every twenty days or so. The Centre for Disease Control estimates are that there could be a million people affected by early next year. Even more than a million people affected by early next year. So there is a very strong sense of urgency here. Countries such as the United States are making very large contributions because they understand that containing Ebola in the three countries where it is most active now is in the interest of the entire world.
KELLY: Of course but given the formal statements that have been made by some of the people at the agencies did you get informally – what kind of commentary did you get about Australia’s reluctance to send in teams. Were people voicing frustration?
PLIBERSEK: Well certainly there is an expectation that a country like Australia could do more. We are considered to be a country with a very strong health system. We know that we’ve got health professionals who are willing to go. We have been very prominent on the Security Council this year and we have cosponsored a resolution that calls on countries to do more to send people, send supplies and equipment, to help with logistics. The US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said something along the lines of “you’ve got countries that are signing up to these resolutions and then not sending doctors or providing beds, that’s a bit rich really.” That’s the sense that I’ve had from each of the organisations and people that I’ve spoken to here, that it’s all very well to have kind words in the United Nations and the Security Council and so on, what they are missing is practical support on the ground. And yet the Government has not yet put in place any measures to support and assist these people to do what they want to do.
KELLY: You’re listening to RN Breakfast, our guest is Tanya Plibersek Deputy Leader of the Opposition and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, joining us from New York. On other issues, you’ve been also meeting with US National Security Officials talking about the situation in Iraq, did you get any clarity on what the mission is in terms defeating ISIS, or a progress report? What was the atmospherics there?
PLIBERSEK: Well certainly I’ve had conversations about Iraq and Syria, of course, the two are so closely linked. And slightly different views from different people but I’d say a strong sense that push back against IS is starting to have effect, that the more inclusive Iraqi government has certainly given people confidence that the Sunni tribes can join the fight against IS, that there is a greater opportunity now of pushing them back or at least halting their progress in Iraq.
KELLY: Can I just interrupt you on that front because we’ve just had an interview earlier with Kym Bergmann from a defence magazine here in Australia, we’ve been talking about on the face of it the more inclusive cabinet but actually realising the interior minister is from a group with links to the Badr Brigade which is a Shiite militia that has been accused of violence against Sunnis in the past. I notice that Shadow Defence Minister Stephen Conroy is now demanding to know is Australian Defence Forces, when they are finally allowed to go into Iraq, could end up working with either Iranian forces or Iranian backed forces, he says this could be a game changer. But it is inevitable isn’t it? Everybody knows that Iranian defence leadership has been in there working with Shia militia and are partly responsible for the success some have had against IS.
PLIBERSEK: Well one of the conditions that Labor put on its support for the involvement of Australian personnel in this mission, in Iraq, was that the Iraqi Government would continue to behave in an inclusive way. We are of course watching very closely, not just the formation of the new government and the fact that it is representative, but there have been concerns expressed in the past about the use of militia, that’s something that we’ll continue to look at very closely. Australia absolutely has a responsibility to protect those civilian communities that were under imminent threat of mass atrocity crime, but this is not a blank cheque. We need to see and Iraqi government –
KELLY: But what does that mean? If Iranian military leadership is in Iraq, is working with the militia who in turn are working with the Iraqi army, is that a red line then for Australian forces in your view?
PLIBERSEK: Well I think we need to have more information before we make any assumptions about what type of involvement, or whether there is Iranian involvement, of course there have been reports but those reports vary a great deal about the scale and the type of involvement that Iran has. Iran has a very strong interest in fighting IS. They are concerned themselves about the prospect of a chaotic state on their border, of Iraq falling apart but to make any more assumptions about the likelihood of Australians coming into contact with Iranian forces we’d need a lot more information.
KELLY: Tanya Plibersek thank you for joining us on Breakfast.
PLIBERSEK: Thank you Fran.
ENDS

ABBOTT HUMILIATED IN THE SENATE

Media Release

Jenny Macklin MP.

Shadow Minister for Families and Payments
 Shadow Minister for Disability Reform

28 October , 2014

In the latest sign that the Abbott Government’s Budget remains in complete chaos, the Social Services and Other Legislation Amendment (2014 Budget Measures No. 1 & 2) Bills have been removed from the Senate without taking the Bills to a vote.

The Government has buckled to pressure from Labor.

This is a major embarrassment for the Government, whose whole budget strategy has been a complete shambles.

Unfortunately, the Government remains committed to these cruel measures.

Last week the Government re-introduced all of these savage Budget cuts in several new bills and rammed a number of them through the House of Representatives.

Make no mistake Tony Abbott still wants to cut the pension.

Tony Abbott still wants to increase the pension age to 70.

Tony Abbott still wants to cut family payments.

Tony Abbott still wants to punish young jobseekers by kicking them off Newstart for six months.

Labor opposes these cruel measures because Labor believes in fairness.

We will continue to fight the Abbott Government’s unfair Budget because it attacks pensioners, families and young jobseekers.

The Government should recognise that Australians do not want this unfair budget.

They should drop these measures immediately. 

DEPARTMENT CONFIRMS MINISTER LIED ABOUT NEW ZEALAND WELFARE

Media Release

Jenny Macklin MP.

Shadow Minister for Families and Payments
 Shadow Minister for Disability Reform

27 October , 2014

Officials from the Department of Social Services last night confirmed in Senate Estimates that Kevin Andrews lied about a mandatory one month wait period for working age payments in New Zealand.
Department officials also confirmed that the Minister had been briefed prior to the budget on the New Zealand welfare system. He had no excuse for spreading these lies.
Appearing on Sky News in June, the Minister said:
“In New Zealand everybody who is seeking to get welfare payments, the dole equivalent, has a one month waiting period.”
This is not true. New Zealand does not have a mandatory one month waiting period.
The Minister made it up.
This was a cynical attempt by Kevin Andrews to try to con the cross-bench and the Australian people into accepting his harsh plan to leave young jobseekers with nothing to live on for six months.
The evidence in Senate Estimates confirms recent advice by the Parliamentary Library which said that:
“[w]e have been unable to find a waiting period that matches the description Minister Andrews has given previously”
And that:
“There doesn’t appear to be formal one-month waiting period that applies to the main unemployment benefit payment in NZ”
It is absolutely appalling that the Government would deliberately spread false information to try and justify a radical withdrawal of all support to young people on Newstart.
The reality is that this measure will leave young jobseekers with nothing to live on for six months. It risks pushing them into poverty, homelessness and social isolation.
Whether for one month or six, Labor will oppose any attempt by this government to leave young people with no income support.

GOVERNMENT TO RAM THROUGH HARSH CUTS

Media Release

Jenny Macklin MP.

Shadow Minister for Families and Payments

 Shadow Minister for Disability Reform

22 October 2014

The Abbott Government will today move to silence debate on a number of its unfair Budget Bills in the House of Representatives, as it once again seeks to ram through legislation that will slash family payments and leave young people with nothing to live on for six months.
Despite Labor forcing the Government into an embarrassing back down on these measures in the Senate just three weeks ago, the Government is intent on pushing ahead with its cruel plans to leave millions of Australians worse off.
Tony Abbott is making it harder for Australians who are already struggling to make ends meet.
The Bills the Government is trying to ram through today include around $11 billion worth of cuts, including:

• Abolishing Family Tax Benefit B for families with children over six
• Leaving young people with no income support for six months
• Shifting young people under 24 from Newstart to the lower Youth Allowance, leaving them around $2,500 a year worse off
• Abolishing the Seniors Supplement, leaving seniors nearly $900 a year worse off
• Abolishing the Pensioner Education Supplement
• Abolishing the Education Entry Payment
• Freezing Family Tax Benefit rates for two years
• Reducing Family Tax Benefit end of year supplements and ceasing indexation
• Applying an interest charge to certain student debts
• Replacing student start-up scholarships with income-contingent loans

These Bills are an attack on families and low income Australians. They deserve to be properly debated.
But the Government would rather avoid proper parliamentary debate than stand up and defend its own Budget.
Labor will vote against these three Bills, in the House and in the Senate. 
And Labor will continue to campaign alongside families, senior Australians and young people across Australia until the Government drops these measures for ever.

Response to Prime Minister’s Statement on Infrastructure – Speech

Media Release

Anthony Albanese MP.

Shadow Minister for Infrastructure and Transport
 Shadow Minister for Tourism
 Shadow Minister for Cities

Oct 30, 2014

I welcome the relatively brief statement by the Prime Minister on his record of infrastructure delivery in his first year in office.

 I suspect that in delivering his account, the Prime Minister was thinking of former Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who once said:
 You don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.
 In infrastructure, talk means nothing. Only results matter.

Despite going to the election giving Australians the impression it would maintain Labor’s six-year focus on nation building, the government is struggling to deliver results. It continues to present old Labor projects as though they are new. It continues to treat its election promises as though their delivery was somehow optional.
 The government has also run up the white flag on traffic congestion by scrapping all Commonwealth investment in the best remedy to solve the problem—better public transport.
 Just a few days before the election, Tony Abbott told that National Press Club a line that he has repeated today, that there will be cranes and bulldozers at work on major new infrastructure projects within one year of the election.
 As recently as last week, a Senate estimates committee heard there were no cranes at work, no bulldozers either—just clouds of bulldust. Today’s statement by the Prime Minister is more of the same.
 Before addressing the statement, let me remind the House of the infrastructure record of the former Labor government.
 We inherited an infrastructure deficit. The Howard government had squandered the windfall receipts from the mining boom on middle-class welfare and electoral bribes.
 That money should have been used to build roads, railway lines and ports. Over the following six years, and despite the global financial crisis, Labor rolled out an infrastructure investment program which yielded results that can best be illustrated by a single statistic. When Labor took office, Australia was 20th amongst OECD nations in terms of infrastructure investment as a proportion of GDP. When Labor left office Australia was first.
 Looking at it another way, Labor lifted total infrastructure spending from $132 per person to $225 per person.
 While others talk about infrastructure, Labor delivers. We are nation builders. We realise that, as John F Kennedy once said:
 Things do not happen. They are made to happen.
 Over six years Labor: established Infrastructure Australia to provide, for the first time, a system for evidence based decision making on infrastructure; doubled the roads budget and upgraded 7500 kilometres of road; rebuilt or built anew 4,000 kilometres of railways. About a third of the national railway network was rebuilt.
 As a result of that investment, we reduced the freight rail journey from Brisbane to Melbourne by seven hours and the journey from the east to west coast by nine hours.
 We committed more to urban passenger rail than all previous Commonwealth governments combined from Federation right up to 2007. We created the nation’s first aviation strategy, the nation’s first port strategy, the nation’s first national freight strategy.
We initiated planning for the second Sydney airport. We focused on cities by establishing the Major Cities Unit and the Urban Policy Forum, including experts from government, planning and development sectors to advise government in better long-term planning—a proud record of achievement.
We did not just throw money at building new toll roads and pretend we were meeting our nation’s infrastructure needs. We established a process for evidence-based decision making on infrastructure and collaborated with states and local government to make sure that we got it right. Then we delivered in spades.
During last year’s election campaign, the then opposition leader made infrastructure a central plank of his platform. A year later, his promises are undelivered and his platform is tottering.
I know why.
 During the period of the Labor Government, the then opposition leaders never had a positive idea and took no time for serious policy consideration. The now Prime Minister was too busy being negative. He turned, indeed, the Coalition of yesterday into the Noalition.
 As election time approached, the most negative opposition leader in Australian history realised he needed to find a positive narrative, so he turned to infrastructure. The problem was that his ideas were too narrow, not thought out and came with with no proper planning.
 That is why these plans are now crumbling and why this first year has been dominated by broken promises.
 Let’s look at a few.
 The then opposition leader promised to retain the independence of Infrastructure Australia. He also promised to reappoint its chairman, Sir Rod Eddington. He failed to do so. And one of the government’s first actions was to launch an assault on Infrastructure Australia’s independence.
 It proposed legislation that would have given the Minister for Infrastructure the power to dictate its research agenda and to censor publication of its findings. The proposal went so far as to suggest that the minister should have exclusive power to exclude entire classes of infrastructure from Infrastructure Australia’s consideration.
 This was a sneaky, backdoor attempt to warn Infrastructure Australia off the government’s ideological no-go area of public transport.
 Fortunately, the government ultimately backed down on this ridiculous plan due to pressure not just from the Parliament but also from outside—from the Business Council of Australia, from Infrastructure Australia itself, from the Property Council and from the Urban Development Institute of Australia. It folded as a result of this pressure.
 Another key coalition promise was to require all Commonwealth infrastructure spending worth more than $100 million to undergo a proper cost-benefit analysis. That analysis was to be ticked off by the experts at Infrastructure Australia. The government has treated this promise with contempt from day one.
 In its first budget, it handed $1.5 billion as an advance payment for Melbourne’s East-West Link project. Indeed, $1 billion of this is for Stage II, which not only did not commence last financial year when the payment was made; it will not commence this financial year and not even next financial year. Yet a billion dollars has already been paid for this project.
 We can only conclude that the payment was designed to pad Premier Napthine’s budget bottom line in advance of the Victorian state election. We should also never forget that this favour to a political mate came at a time when the government claimed it was facing a budget emergency.
 So much for the budget emergency—making advance payments years in advance of any construction.
 That compares with what the assistant minister told the Civil Contractors Federation—and the minister may well remember this. On 6 June he said:
   So we are driving the state governments very hard to give us timetables to ensure that we’re meeting the expected time of delivery of these projects.
  …that we’re hitting milestones, that we’re only making payments to states when they actually deliver the milestones, that they’re not getting money in their bank account prior to milestones being delivered …
 But that same $1.5 billion dollars arrived in the Victorian Government’s bank account, years in advance of anything actually happening.
 The government also provided a concessional loan for Sydney’s WestConnex project—another project without a cost-benefit analysis.
 For anyone who knows anything about Sydney, Stage I of the WestConnex project goes to Haberfield and Stage II goes to St Peters—to the west of the airport. I am a supporter of the concept of taking people to the city and freight to the port, but the road needs to do both of those things if it is to stack up—yet the money has already been paid.
 If you thought East-West and WestConnex were bad, have a look at the so-called Perth Freight Link. It used to be known as Roe 8. This project seems to have been pulled out of a Weet-Bix packet – no cost-benefit analysis and no clarity on details.
 Even the Western Australian Liberal government is in the dark. In June, the WA government’s Parliamentary Secretary for Transport, Jim Chown, told a parliamentary committee:
   … at this stage we have not actually got plans that are worthy of public scrutiny.
 He said that a month after the budget announcement. This is the Liberal Party person in government responsible for this project—an extraordinary proposition.
 The government currently has legislation to institutionalise cost-benefit analysis on projects funded to the tune of more than $100 million. There is a fundamental problem here, though: the analysis would come after the projects have been funded.
 So you determine what projects will have a cost-benefit analysis after you have determined that they will receive more than $100 million of government funding.
 News flash: do the cost-benefit analysis prior to determining where the funding will go. That is a fundamental principle of what should happen.
 This explains why there are problems. Just ask one of my constituents. Vince Crowe received two letters from a representative of the WestConnex Delivery Authority on 26 June 2014—on the same day.
 The first letter said, ‘We’re going to buy your property,’ and the second letter said, ‘We don’t need to buy your property’—on the same day. That is what happens when you do not get planning right.
 Such misadventures are bad enough, but the government’s biggest mistake is its refusal to spend a cent on public transport.
 You cannot deliver solutions to urban congestion without dealing with both road and rail and without having strategies for transport. If you are going to have the infrastructure of the 21st century—as the rhetoric goes—you need to deliver on urban public transport, you need to deliver on high-speed rail and you also need to deliver on the National Broadband Network.
 And one of those infrastructure challenges is just that. The 21st century is the information age. All Australians deserve fibre to the home. All Australians deserve best practice. When we talk about analysis paralysis, an example is that, over the last 12 months, there have been eight separate inquiries into the National Broadband Network—eight separate inquiries. So we need to be serious about that.
 The government’s infrastructure strategy has been to take money off projects that had cost-benefit analysis, like the Cross-River Rail project and Melbourne Metro—to take money from urban public transport—and give it to roads.
 The government does deserve credit for the work that has been done on Badgerys Creek.
 But Badgerys Creek needs to have not just roads, but rail. It needs to preserve the corridor, but it would be logical—when you have the rail line being built to Leppington funded by the former state Labor government—to extend it further and to connect with the main western line. That would be the smart thing to do.
 When the Prime Minister was attempting to spin the 2014 budget he claimed he had delivered significant infrastructure investment. The truth is that his statement today repeated a range of projects, many of which are just about ready to open.
 Gateway WA and the projects on the Bruce Highway that he mentioned, like Calliope Crossroads, are projects that have been underway for years.
 The so-called asset recycling plan has been spoken about by those opposite in the form of interjections. The truth is that the only thing that was recycled there was the money. They took money from the Building Australia Fund, called it the Asset Recycling Fund, and pretended that there was new investment where there was not.
 The truth is that the former government lifted infrastructure investment from 20th in the OECD to first.
 This current government needs to give a commitment that it will maintain that investment at first place. It is simply that.
 I commend to the government the advice of Henry Ford, who once said:
 Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

 The government should get infrastructure investment right. If they do that the nation will benefit.

REVEALED: 24,000 NEWMAN GOVERNMENT JOB CUTS

Media Release

30 October 2014 

More than 24,000 Queensland Government workers have lost their jobs under the Newman Government, the Queensland Opposition revealed today.
Shadow Treasurer Curtis Pitt said analysis of a combination of Questions on Notice, Budget Estimates Hearings testimonies and Departmental annual reports had revealed the full extent of the Newman Government’s job cuts.
“Campbell Newman promised in 2011 that public servants had nothing to fear then embarked on large-scale, arrogant sackings,” he said.
“The Opposition already knew about more than 20,000 sackings and the latest tranche of annual reports reveal even more."
“The truth is that the Newman Government has now presided over more than 24,000 job cuts with the clear support of each and every LNP member in the Queensland Parliament.”
Mr Pitt said Campbell Newman and Tim Nicholls owed Queenslanders who had lost their job an apology.
“The first lie was in 2011 when Campbell Newman said public servants had nothing to fear,” he said.
“The second lie was in January 2013 when Campbell Newman said the sackings had stopped."
“Both Campbell Newman and Tim Nicholls have now presided over the sacking of more than 24,000 Queenslanders at the same time that they claim to be creating jobs."
“That’s tens of thousands of Queenslanders who have lost their job thanks to the Campbell Newman, Tim Nicholls and the LNP."
“It’s sneaky. It’s insulting. It’s tricky."
“Queenslanders deserve an apology for the lies and the deceit from an arrogant government which has clearly not changed."
“The Premier had the audacity to say in Parliament today that people sacked ‘received in some cases very attractive payouts’.
“He was also at pains to say the Government had hired many people, yet the reason for people being sacked en masse was that the size of the Government workforce was apparently too big. He can’t have it both ways."
“How can the Newman Government be trusted on anything they say when the lies keep being exposed?”