Page 2175 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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MR HARGREAVES: I will indeed. I am having a Zen attack. Some of the facts that we do know are that the construction of this particular project was delayed. It was delayed because of the activities of the Liberal Party over the dispute on the alignment. It caused that particular delay. Then of course the Liberal Party encouraged challenges to the project from Save the Ridge. That added an extra amount of time. That added $20-something million to the cost and a couple of years to the whole thing.
The most remarkable thing that I have just heard—and I remember this when I was sitting on estimates committees and on the planning and environment committee—was the estimate of the Liberal Party that this road was going to cost $32 million. We did not believe it even then. I thought someone was having a lend of us when they were saying that. I thought that it might be possible to build a two-kilometre, one-lane dirt track with $32 million. It was always known—anybody with a modicum of common sense would have known—that $32 million was not going to buy you a thing.
The Liberal Party, during their tenure, stumbled from one debacle to another. They were exposed for inefficiency, incompetence, inefficiency again and incompetence again by the planning and environment committee and by estimates committees. Indeed, it was the Stanhope government that got on with the job and started the road. Something around $100 million was always going to be a reality. Anybody with any notion of common sense would know that. However, delaying the project for a considerable amount of time by using one’s influence with one’s federal friends to contest the alignment cost us time. When it costs time, the prices go up. Everybody knows that.
Mr Gentleman: We should send them the bill.
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Gentleman is quite right: we should send them the bill for the difference between the actual cost of the road and $32 million. That would be a bill, wouldn’t it?
The major contributors to the cost escalation of the road have been the legal challenges and the delays—which were a portion of that—and the fight over the alignment. We have experienced well over $20 million worth of delay because of that. In the course of that delay, the price of petroleum products went through the roof, as we all know. There was something like a 17 per cent increase in the price of diesel. Even those opposite know that all contracts have contracts contained within them that account for price escalations.
The other thing, of course, was that, unlike those opposite, when we came to design the road around the suburbs of Aranda, considerable consultation was undertaken with the residents of Aranda. In the process of that, there were significant variations done to the planning of the road itself. They came with an enormous amount of cost increase. Because this particular government were sensitive to the amenity of the people of Aranda, we have actually put up.
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