Page 3846 - Week 11 - Thursday, 24 November 2022
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Is it a part of the project or isn’t it? The Auditor-General called you out and suggested that the cost of raising London Circuit had to be included in the new business case. Basically, by the sound of it, you have agreed with him on that front. Of course, the Auditor-General also called for an updated business case, but you are not going to do that. So I am assuming, now that you have got over the hurdle of that business case, you are going to accept that the raising of London Circuit is a part of the light rail project.
The transport minister said that patronage on public transport has increased since light rail. I would argue that that depends on how you spin the numbers. Yes, there may be more boardings, but, given that all of the direct bus routes between Gungahlin and Civic have been removed, there are twice as many boardings for those in Gungahlin because they have got to catch a bus to the tram, get a tram into the city, and then on the way out do two boardings. I would argue that it does not translate to an increase in patronage.
Indeed, I would suggest that less than seven per cent of the population used public transport before stage 1, and after this billion-dollar spend it is still sitting at less than seven per cent of the population. So if we look at the percentage of the population that is using public transport, the dial has not moved. You have spent more than a billion dollars and, in terms of percentage of population using public transport, you have not moved the dial.
Ms Clay stated here, passionately, that the Greens support this tram vision. I do not know if she just means the Greens MLAs, the ones with or without investment properties on the light rail line, or if she means the entire Greens membership, but I suggest that she should perhaps go to the Greens membership and ask them. I know that there is a bit of work going on in that space at the moment in terms of polling from the Greens, because obviously you are keen to find out what it is that people are actually thinking about this issue.
I want to pay tribute to Mr Gentleman because he is a funny guy. I mean, he is a very, very funny guy and he always manages to get a laugh out of me—none more so than when he said, with a straight face, in this chamber, “The people in Tuggeranong town centre are preparing for the delivery of light rail.” I mean, honestly! Most of the people in the centre of Tuggeranong will not be here when light rail gets to Tuggeranong, and it is ludicrous to suggest that they are genuinely preparing for light rail. Indeed, if they are preparing for light rail, they are doing so because they have been misled by this government.
I have received messages this afternoon from a CEO of a major infrastructure construction company, who is not in the transport space, and from a former senior adviser to a former federal infrastructure minister. In regard to this motion they both said that disclosing when the tram will arrive in Woden, which decade, which year, would not impact negotiations and that disclosing a ballpark figure would not impact negotiations if it was just a public estimate. I put it to the chamber that we are hiding behind roadblocks that do not actually exist.
I got another message from someone in the construction space, who said to me, “How did you arrive at the figure of $3.042 billion? That sounds like a really exact figure.
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