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Funding transport links received less than 20 lines in the treasurer's speech, and most of it was a restatement of the existing expenditure commitments to the AusLink land transport infrastructure program.
The shortfall to address infrastructure was slammed by Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitchell Hooke, who said the budget failed to “outline a strategic framework for reform of Australia’s key infrastructure supply capacity constraints”
“While it goes part-way to addressing the soft and hard infrastructure constraints limiting the minerals industry’s and Australia’s continued growth, it fails to chart a direction for key structural reforms that necessarily involves improved State/Federal government cooperation in planning and expenditure on infrastructure,” Hooke said.
Costello said the $A8.9 billion surplus was the eighth surplus of the 10 budgets he had presented.
He said the run of surpluses had all but wiped out the $A96 billion net debt the Liberals inherited 10 years ago, giving it the capacity to allocate funds from future surpluses to a Future Fund that will help finance the currently unfunded commitments for those generous federal public sector superannuation liabilities.
Although it is not spelled out, the Future Fund under its independent statutory board will probably invest a substantial portion of its predicted $A140 billion reserves (by 2020) in infrastructure.
