Page 1614 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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know that this government has underspent by over half a billion dollars over six years. Add to that the rollover in the latest budget and Labor will have underspent $659 million over seven years. Any Labor budget figure on pledged capital works spending is not worth the paper it is written on.
We need to go to some of the examples of how this government have mismanaged the infrastructure spend in the ACT. The Gungahlin Drive extension project is the most famous. We have seen how they have used it from year to year in different budgets to prop up the projected spend on capital. GDE has falsely propped up infrastructure numbers in budget after budget, making the capital works spend falsely appear bigger than it ever really was.
The previous Liberal government had budgeted to build the GDE as a four-lane road by 2004, at a cost of $53 million. Labor did not sign the contract for the first stage of GDE works until—
Mr Corbell: $53 million: what were you going to get with that?
Mr Hargreaves: Yeah, right—$53 million!
MR SESELJA: The minister chimes in. The minister who could not deliver the GDE chimes in. Labor did not sign the contract for the first stage of GDE works until late 2005, a whole year after the Liberals would have finished the job. And the final contract to build the GDE was not signed until well into 2006, two years after the job should have been finished.
Labor took until 2008 to finish the job, four years after it should have been finished. And they spent $120 million for a road of only half the size that was originally budgeted for. They broke their 2001 election promise to build the road on time, in full and on budget. At the end of it, the people of Gungahlin have a one-lane highway. This is the Labor government’s major infrastructure legacy, and they expect us to believe that they are now going to be able to deliver on their promises. This is their legacy.
Labor has cancelled some public projects altogether, after being announced in previous budgets. The dragway was never going to be delivered. It was just a false accounting entry to pad up the headline capital works figure.
Tharwa bridge is a classic example of how the Labor government have treated the community shabbily and kept the community in the dark over when works would ever start and how long they could take. Labor closed the bridge in 2006 and ruled out interim solutions and directed abuse at those who proposed them. Two years on, they say they will adopt some interim fixes, but they say that the residents of Tharwa will now have to wait up to another 4½ years for a permanent fix.
Labor have been delaying building a new psychiatric unit at Canberra Hospital, even though they were first told five years ago that a major reconstruction would be required. After years of dithering, Labor have actually promised a 65-bed unit and then they downgraded the promise to a 40-bed unit, but the new unit is still not built.
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