Victoria’s transport infrastructure minister, Jacinta Allan, has given Barnaby Joyce a spray at their first meeting since the Nationals leader took over the federal infrastructure portfolio, telling him “Victorians are Australian taxpayers as well”.
The duo opened the $324m Echuca-Moama Bridge on the Victoria-New South Wales border on Monday, in what was their first meeting since the deputy prime minister became infrastructure minister in June last year.
Guardian Australia understands Allan had requested a meeting with Joyce since that time.
A meeting of the nation’s infrastructure and transport ministers scheduled for December was postponed twice, before it switched from an in-person meeting to online. Several items on the agenda for the meeting, held on 11 February, were also removed.
The same day, Joyce announced $600m in funding for Paradise Dam in Queensland, while Allan was represented in the meeting by state transport minister, Ben Carroll.
Asked by a reporter if he was “hard to nail down”, Joyce replied: “I’ll let the Victorian minister speak for herself, but phones worked in both directions last time I checked.”
“If you want to call me, I’m there. If people need money off the commonwealth, we’re there. Canberra is just up the road there. It’s not too hard to get to, there are flights every day,” he said.
“I’m only too happy to meet all my ministers and it’s not parochialism. I work all the time with Rita Saffioti, the Labor [infrastructure] minister in Western Australia, making sure that we build the infrastructures not only in Victoria but across our nation.”
Allan responded by saying the way Joyce “manages his diary is frankly a matter for him”.
“I have been prepared to meet with each and every one of the various infrastructure ministers that have sat around the federal cabinet table over the seven years that I’ve been the infrastructure minister here in Victoria,” she said.
Allan said the state had been forced to “go it alone” on projects such as the Metro Tunnel and West Gate Tunnel.
“If these were projects in New South Wales, we’d be getting 50% of funding for those projects. We’re not getting our fair share here in Victoria, and we will continue to press that point, regardless of the infrastructure minister or the government in Canberra,” she said.
“I simply remind the deputy prime minister that Victorians are Australian taxpayers as well.”
Allan also criticised the federal government’s latest budget, which allocated about 5.9%, or $208m, out of a total $3.56bn worth of new infrastructure funding over the four-year budget period to Victoria.
Victoria is also only state without a city deal with the commonwealth and has been left out of a $7.1bn regional economies fund.
Echuca-Moama Bridge is jointly funded by the federal, Victorian and New South Wales governments.
