PAUL TURTON, ABC NSW HOST: So what does the Minister make of the decision? Could she give us some background on it for example? The Federal Minister for Infrastructure, Catherine King, is with us now. Minister, thanks for coming on.

MINISTER FOR INFRASTRUCTURE, TRANSPORT, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT CATHERINE KING: Paul, you're welcome. Good to be with you. 

TURTON: Are you using rubbery numbers?

KING: Well, I mean, I think what Barnaby has just demonstrated is why the National Party, or now One Nation that he now belongs to, should never, ever, ever be allowed to have their hands on the Treasury coffers, because they do not know how to actually manage a budget. They do not know how to actually manage a project. What we did when we came to office was we had a project that had been poorly planned and not properly funded. The first thing the board of the Australian Rail Track Corporation said to me is, we're going to need a lot more money for this project to deliver it. When I asked them how much, they couldn't tell me. So we got Kerry Schott to go and do a really good deep dive into what was happening with Inland Rail. Really serious work into looking at all of the parts of it. She was not confident. She said she thought that it looked like it was going to cost an additional $31 billion but was not confident. And they were figures that came from the Australian Rail Track Corporation themselves, who were building the line. The figures now, we have had the Australian Rail Track Corporation and Inland Rail now provide all of their commercial data to ACIL Allen, the country's largest independent economic advisory group, and they have now come back to say their strongest estimates is it will now cost $45 billion. Three times the original cost. So that's where the figures come from, and they have gone literally kilometre by kilometre, gone through all of the ARTC figures. And so what we've decided to do is to obviously prioritise getting it to Parkes. Now, what that does allow you to do is actually start to operate the Inland Rail line. It gets you to Perth, it gets you to Newcastle, and it gets you to the Port of Botany. Now they are good things to do, and so that means you can get from Beveridge Intermodal terminal, bearing in mind that Inland Rail never had a plan to get it to either the Port of Melbourne or the Port of Brisbane. So we're getting it to Beveridge, which we're building at the moment. We will preserve the corridor, gazette the corridor for Inland Rail. We'll try and preserve and work on land to get Intermodals at Gowrie and Ebenezer and obviously still at Parkes. But the prudent thing to do, and we've got rail operators coming out today saying this is the prudent thing to do, is to now invest money in the existing Australian Rail Track Corporation lines that could make us money. It hasn't returned a dividend to Government for quite some time, because we've been seeing a drop in the rate of freight on rail. The Government is putting an additional $1.75 billion into the resilience of the track. It's been closed at numerous times because there was a failure for the previous Government to invest in it. It's 150 years old. We've had floods, we've had signaling failures, a range of things going wrong with it, so we need to shore it up and build its resilience. And then what we've also announced is a $55 million package to look at incentivising freight on rail. We're serious about getting freight on rail. But frankly, I'm not going to be taking any advice from from Barnaby on infrastructure projects I can tell you. 

TURTON: Minister, what's gone wrong then? If your party was a champion of this project back in the early days, floated it, and we heard from Barnaby Joyce about the now Prime Minister, then person who was in your position at that time, Anthony Albanese, championing and promoting the scheme. What's changed? Did you not do the enough preliminary planning? 

KING: So we put a billion dollars in, and then we lost office. So we weren't in Government very long after that promise, and then we had a decade, frankly, of absolute and utter incompetence when it came to delivery of infrastructure projects. I inherited an infrastructure pipeline that had had a lot of people making a lot of promises, getting up and having the media releases, but not a lot of focus on the actual delivery and fiscal discipline required to actually deliver really big and complex projects. You'll see we've applied a lot of lessons, a lot of the really negative lessons about Inland Rail, we're applying those to High Speed Rail. It's why we're spending a lot of time doing all of the development and design work, getting all the geo tech work done, getting the financing mechanisms in place. None of that work was done, they announced it and they just saw it as some big, you know, the money would always somehow be there. The other problem we've got is it's been funded off equity, so that means basically, the finance, it doesn't appear on the budget, but we're expected to get a return. We will not get a return on the investment that we've made so far to date, it'll be around $14 billion that will have been invested today. We will not get a return on that investment, it's not projected for a very, very long time, certainly not in my lifetime. So that's one of the problems. The other is that there's no more equity funding. It's hit its limit for what the Department of Finance will allow from equity funding. So this would mean, in order to find $45 billion we would be having to forego lots of other infrastructure projects, particularly in our regions. So really, Barnaby doesn't know what he's talking about basically. Didn't when he was minister, doesn't now. 

TURTON: All right, let's go to our listeners and see if you think they know what they're talking about. Thanks to Ali, who says Inland Rail, get rid of AUKUS and the fast rail to Sydney, free up some dollars for Inland Rail, says Ali. Graham from Tamworth, says it's a simple question that you failed to grasp, does the project offer value for money? Spending money can make things happen, good Government is making informed decisions, not just ignoring facts. This is going to be interpreted as big city preference, when we look at things like fast rail between Sydney and Newcastle. In regional Australia, this is going to be seen as our Federal Government again favouring cities over the bush.

KING: Well, I'd say that's a nonsense, because what we are doing is investing in the existing Australian Rail Track Corporation track, which is all through our regions. We're putting all of that money, an additional $2.8 billion overall, in and all of that is through regional areas. When it comes to roads, for example, something Barnaby didn't do, we've doubled the amount of money that goes to every Local Council, the vast majority of those are in our regions. It is now a billion dollars each and every year, coming from the Commonwealth to our road projects. We're funding projects like the Tanami, Outback Way, sealing parts of the Sturt highway. There's a lot of money going into our regions, but what you've got to do is these projects properly, and at the moment, on the basis of the information we have available to us, would you say Inland Rail is value for money? And the answer is no. That's the problem we've got. And so I am doing those things properly. I am taking a very careful, measured, practical response to those and we can't, frankly, on a project that was a dog's breakfast when we came to office that we've been trying to manage, and get it back on track. And we'll get it to Parkes by 2027 that opens up east-west, it opens up so being able to do that. Opens up to the Port of Newcastle and to Port of Botany. We'll start to make money on that, but it certainly won't be anywhere near the amount of money that's been outlaid on the project. And then to try and find an additional $45 billion, that would mean either cutting existing infrastructure projects or foregoing future infrastructure projects, particularly in the regions, and there's a lot of lot of demand in that.

TURTON: Minister, I appreciate you coming on today. Thank you.

KING: You are very welcome, Paul.