Hansard debates

Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) (16:22:30): Australians are overwhelmingly practical, not ideological. They like results. They voted for the Andrews Labor government because it delivered results. This is the difference between the contributions that are being made here. We have got the biggest build in the state’s history. The Treasurer puts it into context: Victoria is investing more in one year in infrastructure than the Australian government is in a decade. They are the critical facts that underpin this argument. Members interjecting. Mr McGUIRE: It is really distracting to hear how low the debate can be in this chamber when we need to actually address the critical issues. This is what Victorians are backing in. You can be a commentator; you can try and make gratuitous commentary from the sidelines—good luck to you with that. I want to address the key points that are really underlying this debate and this legislation. Having these amendments brings together a call for unity tickets that I have been describing as well to address economic development, jobs and housing affordability and how we can actually do that. If you think it through, we enjoy one of the world’s most livable cities, and we are in the state that is the national leader economically and that has led the world for uninterrupted growth—a record now stretching into its 28th year. These are the parameters that the Andrews government is laying down, and the transport network is critical to all of this because population growth is driving economic activity. That is really how it works. It is one thing to take a cheap shot from the opposition or from the commentating box, but it does not change the focus and the direction of this government, which is delivering. That is the key thing; it is the reason why it got such support from the electorate at the last election. The Big Build is the centre point, with the Suburban Rail Loop, when that has been done; the rail link to Melbourne Airport; and the North East Link as well. So we have got these huge projects. We actually have a unity ticket on some of them with the Australian government, and this is what Australians are crying out for. They want us to get the coordination and the collaboration, underwrite the next era of economic prosperity and drive economic and cultural development. This is what they are voting for; this is what they want. And to speak on behalf of Melbourne’s north and Broadmeadows, which I am being invited to do, let us look at what we are doing there. We have blue-chip infrastructure. We are aggregating the proposition of affordable land, the best and the most affordable within 16 kilometres of the heart of one of the world’s most livable cities. We boast Australia’s largest concentration of advanced manufacturing—and this is really critical to the bigger picture strategy on what Australia is going to make and sell to the world to make its way in the world. Advanced manufacturing is critical to this because it is about high-value, high-profit and higher wage jobs. That is the opportunity that we are presenting, and because we have such a concentration of outstanding infrastructure in Broadmeadows we have been able to attract the private sector in. We have got a new investor with a $500 million investment on the table for the old Ford manufacturing site—and that is for Broadmeadows and Geelong—and what he is looking to do is to harness this infrastructure. So just to spell it out: we have two train lines in and the spur into the Ford site; we have got the ring-road; we have got the Tullamarine Freeway, which the Andrews government widened; we have got the curfew-free international airport at the back door; and we have got Sydney Road as well. So here is this incredible concentration of infrastructure, which is really important. Then the Suburban Rail Loop will bring that together as well. This is the big picture that the Andrews Labor government paints, and this is what people have actually voted for and support. This gives us opportunities, then, if you think even further in a regional way—and the member for Essendon was talking about these sorts of issues as well. Melbourne Airport plans to soon build another runway, expanding its importance in air passenger and freight transport, and we have the nearby secondary airport at Essendon Fields. We have the roadworks, including the Tullamarine Freeway, which is newly widened and links to Melbourne’s central business district. There are also the features of the M80 ring-road, and of course we have just announced in the last week the new blueprint for how we are going to expand different parts of that, particularly to the benefit of the people that I represent from Broadmeadows and also neighbouring Thomastown. This is how we can do it. We have got another mechanism: the city deals that we have been able to get support for from the Australian government—one of those for the north-west and the other for the south-east. So this will hopefully help drive innovation, which can also benefit social cohesion and provide gainful employment. We want to actually make sure we deliver where it is needed most, and connecting the disconnected through jobs is the astute way of addressing that strategy and that social result. We have been able to get all of the seven municipal councils in Melbourne’s north united behind supporting a city deal, and La Trobe University, as you would be aware, Speaker, also has a lot of money on the table to make investments. It has billions of dollars that it wants to invest, and here is a way to get that alignment right with an anchor university of that calibre, which would be fantastic. If you think of the Broadmeadows area, Ford no longer manufactures but they have reinvested hundreds of millions of dollars annually in their innovation centre for the Asia-Pacific region, so that is their centre of excellence. Then you have this new investor who wants to drive technology for new industries and jobs. I am looking to get a major university to be another anchor tenant or to co-locate, and they can do that either onsite or through the global learning village model, where we already have La Trobe as a partner, and Victoria University and Deakin University. That connects then the skills and the jobs where we need them most, and this helps us to fast-track through deindustrialisation. The transport network is at the heart and the hub of this; it is critical to it. This goes then to the bigger issue of how we address the social determinants of life. What is the investment in health? What is lifelong learning—the skills, jobs and meaning, which is critical—and then how do we connect that to opportunity? At the heart of this is the transport network and how we actually coordinate that. This bill underscores the ambitious investment program. It meets the needs and expectations of transport system users in the future and requires the optimising of the use of current assets. This is what you do: you aggregate your assets, you build on them, you get a more efficient and effective system to run it and to drive it. This bill is what underscores this. Then you use greater integration of the networks, user experience and information into the transport system to ensure better alignment throughout the 'transport development lifecycle’, as it is now being called. This is why this piece of legislation is important in its own right, but obviously it goes to the big picture. It is another piece in the big picture of how you develop a city and a state and how you get better integration to drive those key things because economic activity is hard to get now. You have seen the head of the Reserve Bank say that you cannot get stimulus now from cutting interest rates. The head of Infrastructure Australia says the Big Build we have should now become the new normal. This is really important, and it is the Victorian government that is the leader nationally in how we do this. Our call is to the Australian government to be a better partner. They are coming in on some of the issues, and we need them to come in and combine on more. This is why this bill matters in this context, and I commend it to the house.