Page 3364 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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Mr Pratt: There is replacement timber available.
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Pratt!
MR HARGREAVES: The closest we can get to the timber is still growing.
Mr Pratt: It is not.
MR HARGREAVES: It is in the form of a tree. A tree is one of those big brown things with all that really green stuff hanging off it, Mr Pratt, for your information. You are barking up the wrong one, Mr Pratt. Mr Speaker, you would have to cut this tree down, and you would have to let it lie there for 12 months to cure before you could nail it on to a nice piece of beam. We could not start anything to build that new bridge inside 12 months.
Mr Pratt: Experts contradict that.
MR HARGREAVES: It would take another 18 months or so to construct it. That, of course, is not allowing for the removal of the Bailey bridge. Until recently, the Bailey bridge was holding up part of the bridge in sections. The deterioration of the bridge was so bad that it actually fell and is now resting on the Bailey bridge.
Mr Pratt: That’s right.
MR HARGREAVES: It is resting on it. Now, those Bailey bridge segments are owned by the RTA, and they want them back in the middle of next year. You cannot buy them; they are out-of-date technology, and the RTA of New South Wales needs them for their own purposes. We investigated buying the next best thing, and the closest thing we could get was in the UK, and it was going to cost us just over $1 million to bring it into the country and put it down at Tharwa. This is not included in Mr Pratt's considerations of the cost of doing the bridge again, neither the time it would take to bring the materials in—
Mr Pratt: This is all red herrings, John.
MR HARGREAVES: Not the time for dismantling and not the time for bringing in the segments in to fix it up. No, they are not in their consideration at all.
Mr Pratt: These are all red herrings, John.
MR HARGREAVES: To do the bridge again, with the dismantling and the reconstruction, it would cost about $10 million, and it would take at least three years to do it.
Mr Pratt: That’s rubbish.
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Speaker, this is the information I have. In terms of whether I am going to table something for Mr Pratt’s benefit, no. If Mr Pratt wants to give me
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