Wednesday, 15 September 2021

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria)

Incorporated pursuant to order of Council of 14 September:

I wish to make a statement on the findings of the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office report Major Infrastructure Program Delivery Capability.

What has been uncovered by this well-respected body is nothing less than a total indictment on the government’s ability to progress, let alone achieve, their many bloated construction promises. Across 74 pages, including independently collated data, projections, and recommendations, the Auditor-General’s report confirms in striking and damning detail what the Victorian people have long suspected to be the case: delay, inefficiency, no accountability.

The Victorian people deserve their taxes to be effectively utilised, and to be safe in the knowledge that any increased spending results in better value for their hard-earned dollar.

This concept is the foundation of any good governance, and yet, it is not the case here. According to the released Auditor-General’s report, there is a total of $144 billion of new and existing projects funded—35 per cent higher infrastructure spending since 2019—encompassing 30 major projects in that same period. This is an outrageous and unjustified $3.8 billion cost increase in two years, as represented in the 2021–22 state budget papers, where the Department of Treasury and Finance noted that the costs for 117 major projects had a net increase of 4 per cent. These projects enjoy significant delays, a lack of genuine strategic planning, and most worrying of all, crippling resource shortages.

In the Auditor-General’s independent assessment, paralysing resource shortages are present in not one but four areas of infrastructure delivery: industry workforce personnel, the public sector planning employees, the available construction market firms and even basic construction materials.

Construction workers are sitting on their hands while supply routes to project sites are constantly waiting on critical supplies and workforce personnel.

In the case of high-skilled worker shortages, this is best exemplified by the Major Transport Infrastructure Authority assessing that an astounding 98 per cent of high-skilled construction occupations will have some level of shortage between 2022 and 2025.

This is only exacerbated by the outrageous shortages of qualified public sector employees, where there has apparently been concern about scarcities in project leadership, including technical knowledge, as far back as 2016.

The construction market is lacking too, with three agencies reporting there simply aren’t enough construction firms contracted—or even available in the government’s pool—to meet project demands!

Given that the state budget forecasts spending on infrastructure will increase an average $21.9 billion a year between 2020–21 and 2024–25, the Victorian people will rightfully question how effectively this huge slice of taxpayer money will be spent given their past performance.

This government has demonstrated it cannot manage a COVID pandemic properly, just as it cannot manage infrastructure delivery. These problems that have existed since 2016 will undoubtedly get worse. This report points to a government of inefficiency, excess and maladministration. The so-called government pipeline plan of infrastructure projects is a government pipedream that was clearly decided to be a slogan-winning idea before any actual strategic preparations were conducted.

The Auditor-General’s office reports:

… no agency fully understands the construction industry and public sector’s ability to deliver the government’s pipeline, or how effective their work to mitigate resource shortages is.

This has no doubt likely inspired the frustrations of the Auditor-General and their staff, as the government has been consistent over the years on their messaging that they have supposedly six strategies and 80 actions proposed to remedy these glaring issues. This is all well and good; however, the Auditor-General determines these targets to be inadequately coordinated by the agencies led by the government—the so-called task force established by the relevant agencies back in 2015 to stop this ballooning crisis has, in the opinion of the Auditor-General, achieved ‘less than a quarter of its planned actions’ to address workforce and construction market shortages.

It is no wonder that the government has been unable to prevent this growing disaster of mismanagement. It is the Auditor-General’s opinion that none of the relevant government agencies have feasible or reasonable methods with which to measure infrastructure service delivery—the Auditor-General report speaks of the lack of detailed briefings between departmental staff and the government and perhaps most damning of all, in the estimation of the Auditor-General, none of the agencies investigated know the effects of these shortages and how they could affect the pipeline’s delivery. This is entirely due to ongoing ‘gaps in the agencies’ data and limitations in their forecasting models’, something that was covered in a previous Auditor-General’s report this May—again critical of the government—known as Measuring and Reporting on Service Delivery, showing that the models used by the government to report and predict effectiveness of service delivery are obfuscated, limited and in some cases even non-existent.

This report is frankly an indictment on government major project delivery. Honest hardworking Victorians should rightfully expect project quality, timely infrastructure project completion and value for money. How is this even possible when projects are announced without proper, robust costings?

This government has demonstrated a penchant for almost unmatched and increasingly unlimited power, without any reference to accountability and transparency. Victorians have the right to expect the highest standard of infrastructure delivery and this government’s failure to deliver this standard over multiple years should be held to account. I do not believe in allowing shortcomings to be left unanswered. I, as any reasonable Australian would, believe in accountability, exemplary conduct and ownership of wrongdoing. This standard should be the basis of any honourable government.

The current Minister for Transport Infrastructure, and until 2018 the Minister for Major Projects, the Honourable Jacinta Allan, is responsible for multiple shortcomings that have occurred under her purview for years with multiple reports indicating a crisis: she has sat on her hands and shown no leadership in the matter, instead allowing others to take responsibility for her incompetence on a grand scale.

Labor is not the party of project delivery; it is the party of mismanagement and crisis.