King’s priorities in her new role are to overhaul regional grants programs to eliminate the pork-barrelling seen in the past,and to reshape Infrastructure Australia including finding a new chief executive officer and cleaning out its board.
Infrastructure Australia chief executive Romilly Madew announced in the week before the election she would leave in July to take up a job as the head of Engineers Australia.
Former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce chair of Infrastructure Australia late last year,a move criticised by Labor at the time.
King told theThe Sydney Morning Herald andThe Age the government had “made our concerns about the existing board pretty widely known”.
She wants a short,sharp review of Infrastructure Australia to “get it back on track” and restore its role as the pre-eminent advisory body on large-scale infrastructure projects.
The new minister has already asked her department to examine all the promises Labor made during the election as well as take a “very granular look” at what is left on the books from the previous Coalition government.
“If any of those do not stack up on a merits review,we will not be proceeding with those … They are the ones that are not under the Land Transport Act,they’re the community sporting facilities and those sorts of things,” she said of Labor’s promises.
But King stopped short of saying whether she would scrap some of the Coalition’s more controversial projects,such as the which the auditor-general found were overwhelmingly promised in Liberal-held electorates and not allocated based on merit. Of the 27 car parks still in the planning phase,14 do not yet have a start date allocated.
“We haven’t made any decisions about those,” King said.
Similarly,for the,King says the federal government will talk to the states about what is possible and what they actually want.
“We’re going to work through the infrastructure investment pipeline line by line to look at what is able to be delivered,how the decision-making was made and work collaboratively with state and territory governments,and local governments where they’re the proponent,to work our way through that pipeline,” she said.
King and Regional Development Minister Kristy McBain have also sought urgent advice about redesigning regional grants programs to make them more transparent and have a fairer distribution of funds.
The Building Better Regions Fund has come under scrutiny,but King said the unfairness had been increasingly evident in the as well.
She wants local councils to make sure they are putting forward projects that are ready to go instead of having to make multiple attempts to get funding,and for her department and government to take “a long hard look” at decision-making processes.
“[The grants programs] will look very different to what they have in the past,” she said.
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