Mr PALLAS (Tarneit)  — I address the  Public Accounts and Estimates Committee report on the 2011-12  budget estimates, part  3, specifically with reference to section 2.6.1 of the report dealing with infrastructure spend. Page 26 states:

The 2011-12  budget papers explain that the estimated reduction in the cost of  the  infrastructure program over the  period to 2014-15 takes  into account an  expected easing of the commonwealth government’s stimulus funding.

I  refer also  to comments  made by  the Treasurer  in the  Public Accounts  and Estimates Committee hearing 6 May 2011 when he said:

  One of the real issues we have in this state is obviously productivity …

He went on to say:

  So what are we doing about it?

And he identified that we have to ensure that our infrastructure is targeted and that  the  bottlenecks  and  congestions  around our ports and our rail and road networks are freed up.

What we have seen, of  course,  is  a  progressive  reallocation  of effort from projects that were under way and funding that had  been allocated to an internal thought  process  that  does  not  seem to have rendered much clarity about  the government’s  direction  nor  given  the  community  any  confidence  that   the government has any clear  view  in  terms of where its infrastructure spend will go.

The projects that were planned or had preliminary funding allocated to them have disappeared.  For example, the  $40 million allocated for  the truck action plan has disappeared  and that project is on hold. The $5 million Hoddle Street grade separation study  has also ceased. The  $10 million allocated  for  the WestLink preliminary work has not been  expended, and the project seems to have ceased in terms of its  activity and emphasis also. A failure to deliver on promised plans for  infrastructure has  seen investment  in  transport infrastructure  trending downwards since 2010, where it had been increasing before.

So  effectively  we have had no new major projects identified  in  the  previous budget.

I refer to an article  written by  Matt Dunckley and published in the Australian Financial  Review in  which he stated that a failure to make applications to the federal government has affected the capacity of the state of Victoria to be able to  acquire Infrastructure Australia funding,  and that will  inevitably put the state of Victoria further and further down the queue for priority.

On 27  June  2011  the  Age  reported  that the  Treasurer had  called upon  the Secretary of  the Department of  Treasury and Finance to  ‘urgently’ develop ‘an infrastructure pipeline’. We have yet to see this plan. Melbourne-based business figures  are  getting  increasingly  concerned  about the  consequence  of  this inaction, and one quote  in  the article of  27  June  in the Age  has  business figures stating as follows:

  Six  months,  12  months, 18 months,  I  don’t know. It’s a  pain  in the arse  sitting here waiting for a  whole lot of work that we were doing before and we  don’t know whether it is going ahead or not going ahead.

This uncertainty is leading directly to a consequent effect upon  our employment market. We are seeing in the latest figures that since June 2011,  170 Victorian jobs have been lost every day — or 1214 jobs lost every week, or 5162 jobs lost every month. That is  a direct consequence of a  failure to invest and a failure to provide clarity and certainty of direction. We all know that when it comes to the provision  of  multi-factor productivity  one  of the key  investments  that government can make and one of the key interventions that a state government can make regards infrastructure. This government has talked a lot about productivity but  has delivered  very little  in terms  of demonstrating what  it will  do to intervene to address  productivity issues. Getting  people to work  quicker  and getting businesses operating quicker has a dramatic impact.

I direct attention to the comments of Dr Frank Gelber from BIS Shrapnel reported in an Age article as follows:

  We look out two or  three years  and it’s  difficult to  see where  Victoria’s  growth is going to come from … We see investment in Victoria falling.

  …

  These  are things [the Victorian government] could do. But we  can’t  see  the  next round of infrastructure projects coming through. Victoria is just falling  behind the pack.

See Tim’s speech in Hansard here.