An audit will address funding Anthony Albanese says was taken from public transport and used to fund Sydney’s WestConnex toll road without assessment from Infrastructure Australia.
Albanese, the shadow minister for transport and infrastructure, welcomed the news that the Commonwealth Auditor General will conduct an Australian National Audit Office performance audit of the approval and administration of Commonwealth funding for WestConnex.
The shadow minister, who represents the seat of Grayndler in Sydney’s inner west, demanded an audit several times earlier in 2016.
While the audit announced this week involves WestConnex, Albanese has also raised concerns over the funding of the Perth Freight Link in WA, and the East West Link in Melbourne.
“The problem here is proper process,” he told ABC’s Fran Kelly on Thursday morning.
“What we had was a series of roads promised in the 2014 budget – toll roads, favoured by Tony Abbott – where he took money away from public transport [and] put it into three toll roads … a troika of failure.”
Albanese says WestConnex is of particular concern because the Abbott Government “put forward an advanced payment of $750 million … before any business case, before any proper assessment was done”.
He said Infrastructure Australia was created by the Labor Government in 2008 to ensure planning and assessment took place before major projects were funded.
“[WestConnex] was looked at well after the money had already been forwarded,” Albanese said, “and the $2 billion from the Commonwealth finalised.”
The Auditor General will investigate whether the taxpayer’s interests were protected in the process, or whether politics had driven the decision making process over independent assessment, he explained.
“What we have here is the government deliberately forwarded money in advance of projects, so that the 2013/14 budget figures – Labor’s last year – looked worse than they were, and so future years would look better.
“It was a conscious decision by the Commonwealth Government to use the Commonwealth balance sheet essentially to try and manipulate where the fiscal position was.”
But Labor’s concerns don’t stop at the process, Albanese explained.
“We also have big problems with the road,” he said. “If you get the process wrong, then you’ll get a bad outcome.”
The shadow minister never explicitly said the road should not be built, but said the current WestConnex design doesn’t achieve the original objective of getting freight to and from Port Botany.
“The current proposal of WestConnex doesn’t go anywhere near the port,” he said, “it stops at St Peters.”
On top of that, Albanese says tolls on the road will see motorists paying “triple figures” to use it during a working week.