Labor has asked the Auditor-General to investigate the Turnbull government's entire road construction program after a revelation that up to $18 million of it is to be diverted into advertising.
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Infrastructure Minister Warren Truss has confirmed that the government is considering an $18 million advertising campaign to raise awareness of "long-term planning and investment into road and rail infrastructure".
The program will be funded out of the existing infrastructure budget.
It follows a $305,910 contract to the Wallis Consulting Group for market research.
A spokesman for the minister said the research had uncovered "a general lack of awareness and significant knowledge gaps within the Australian population regarding the Australian government's investments in transport infrastructure".
It found people "were interested in knowing more about the Australian government's investment in transport infrastructure".
Labor infrastructure spokesman Anthony Albanese said the idea was Orwellian coming after a quarter in which the Bureau of Statistics found Australian governments had wound back infrastructure investment by 20 per cent.
"Mr Truss is cutting actual spending to fund spin, when he should be spending money for the purpose for which it was allocated - actually building something," he said.
The money would fund more than 100 projects to address dangerous intersections under the Black Spots program, assessed as costing an average of $157,000 each.
Mr Albanese wrote to Auditor-General Grant Hehir on Wednesday saying that two of the Coalition's major road projects had collapsed and the third was stalled.
Mr Hehir has already inquired into Melbourne's dumped East West Link project and found the decision of the Abbott government to pay $1 billion for it on the last day of the 2013-14 financial year was made without adequate information and exposed it to heightened financial risk.
The Abbott government made a similar advance payment of $3.5 billion for Sydney's WestConnex program. Cost overruns and a change of route have blown out its cost from $10 billion to $16.8 billion.
The Perth Freight Link is in limbo after a court ruled environmental approvals invalid.
"It is clear that there has been a systematic failure in the government's infrastructure program that was announced in the 2014 budget," Mr Albanese's letter reads. "It appears that what all these projects have in common is a breakdown in proper analysis and a move away from the evidence-based policy approach that was established under Infrastructure Australia."
The Auditor-General's office said it had received the letter and was considering how to respond.
