Page 1219 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 30 May 2007
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MR PRATT: You are right. As my colleague reminds me, a $96 billion deficit was left behind by Keating.
Not only have John Howard and Peter Costello in recent years had the challenges of the drought to manage in terms of budgeting but also they have had to manage Australia’s national interests and our commitments overseas in terms of international terrorism. Those issues, which have clearly put pressures on the budget, have been so well managed. But on top of that, the $96 billion deficit has had to be paid off in the life of the Howard government.
International commentators well recognise that. If you were to have scanned the BBC and CNN in the immediate days after the handing down of the Australian budget, there was a fair amount of pats on the back internationally for what was seen to be an excellent budget in one of the world’s better-managed economies. In effect, what that has meant for us in the ACT is this: the federal budget has proved a useful here-comes-the-cavalry relief for the ACT versus Stanhope’s neglect of ACT budgetary management.
Let us have a look at a number of advantages provided to this community by the federal budget: $480,000 maintenance will be provided for the Barton and Federal highways; $0.602 billion will be provided to fix four, yet-to-be-disclosed, crash hot spots; and $3 million is allocated for the duplication of the Barton Highway in addition to the $480,000. A fair share of the Oz link funding will be provided for ACT roads. The fact is that the Chief Minister is on the record as having said that he recognises that we are going to get a fair share of the Oz link funding. Yet we see the ACT government’s neglect on a range of road upgrades and ongoing maintenances.
The Tharwa Drive duplication has been neglected. The Pialligo Road upgrades have been neglected. The Majura Road upgrades have been put back and back, with smaller amounts of money provided, because a lot of the budget that should have been quarantined or left in place for road maintenance and road upgrades has been bled off, to be poured down the sinkhole of the GDE. We now know that the GDE has, let us say conservatively, at least doubled and, more likely, tripled the original project analysis costs of 2001. We have got less bang for the buck. We have got one lane each way versus the two each way envisaged under the initial project analysis.
We also see that, in relation to the Tharwa bridge project—and I talk about all aspects of that, the heritage aspects, perhaps the refurbishment aspects when Labor were on the drawing board and now the decision to replace that old bridge with a new one—the whole thing has been a project management screw-up. For some reason, the ACT government did not identify 18 months ago, when they should have, that the old heritage bridge needed urgent works. Suddenly the Tharwa community and, more broadly, the ACT community are stuck with a project which had not been envisaged.
The jury is still out, by the way, in the thinking of many engineers, as to whether or not the Tharwa bridge could not be refurbished. It is interesting to note that, when the Tharwa community have approached the ACT government department of municipal services to get a more definite understanding of those implications, they could not get answers.
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