Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Andrew Dickens: Are Labour serious about infrastructure investment?
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: So Barbara Edmunds from the Labor Party, the Finance spokesperson,
- 0:03Speaker 1: is in front of the Investment Conference today representing the
- 0:05Speaker 1: Labor Party who may or may not be in charge
- 0:08Speaker 1: of Treasury benches in the future. Now the conference will
- 0:11Speaker 1: be waiting to see if Labor is on the infrastructure bus,
- 0:14Speaker 1: if they will support the projects the National League government
- 0:17Speaker 1: are into and proposing right now, and if they are
- 0:20Speaker 1: on board with foreign investments in our infrastructure plans. Barbara's
- 0:25Speaker 1: is actually the critical address of the weekend because yesterday
- 0:27Speaker 1: we heard the big concern is pipelines, the pipelines of
- 0:31Speaker 1: work overseas. Investors don't want to set up shop in
- 0:34Speaker 1: New Zealand for a project only to find that we
- 0:36Speaker 1: back out later and there's no more work for them,
- 0:38Speaker 1: leaving them with a big investment and nowhere to go.
- 0:41Speaker 1: And to be fair, National has done that with the
- 0:43Speaker 1: cancelation of big projects like the ferries. Labor also did
- 0:46Speaker 1: it with a moratorium on road development. So look, it
- 0:49Speaker 1: is time for a bipartisan accord on what we need
- 0:51Speaker 1: to do in this country. But that will be hard
- 0:53Speaker 1: to find as our parties have used infrastructure as a
- 0:56Speaker 1: way to differentiate between themselves and that's done. For instance,
- 1:01Speaker 1: roads are neither left wing nor right wing. Labour's anti
- 1:05Speaker 1: road sentiment has been based on faulty logic. Somehow they
- 1:09Speaker 1: think that building roads means more missions, which is ridiculous.
- 1:14Speaker 1: It means the same emissions but on bad roads. In fact,
- 1:17Speaker 1: it means more emissions as traffic gets stalled. A good
- 1:21Speaker 1: road is an efficient road, and an efficient road helps
- 1:24Speaker 1: with both emissions and productivity. And I wonder whether the
- 1:28Speaker 1: Labor Party sees this. So today all eyes on Barbara
- 1:31Speaker 1: to see if she's logical or ideological. For more fam
- 1:35Speaker 1: Earlily Edition with Ryan Bridge. Listen live to News Talks
- 1:39Speaker 1: it Be from five am weekdays, or follow the podcast
- 1:42Speaker 1: on iHeartRadio