Page 1886 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 25 June 2008
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remove the peaking power station from the proposed CTC development at block 1671 in the District of Tuggeranong, as part of our response to community concerns.
Please be assured … that ActewAGL continues to firmly believe in the strategic rationale for building such a power station. Consequently, ActewAGL will continue to seek a site and build such a plant at some time in the foreseeable future. This will, of course, require the identification of a suitably remote site within the ACT or nearby NSW that is sufficiently close to gas and electricity infrastructure. ActewAGL will also need to rework the feasibility models based on that location.
One particular site that has potential to meet our needs is near Williamsdale adjacent to a piece of land where Transgrid is already planning to build a major piece of electricity infrastructure.
ActewAGL’s intention is to initiate this process as soon as practicable and once the proposed CTC data centre is sufficiently progressed through the … planning processes.
This fully accords with my own statement after the consortium announced the scaling back of the original proposal on the Mugga Lane site that there was still an intention, if possible, to build a peaking power plant but on a site more distant from concentrated residential areas to meet expressed community concerns. As we see from today’s media and from last night’s television, that seems to be exactly what is happening.
Where is the Leader of the Opposition’s evidence that a single dollar of investment has been lost to the territory as a result of anything that I have said or done? There isn’t any, Mr Speaker. Yet again, all the evidence, right up to last night’s news and this morning’s paper, points to a reality that is diametrically opposed to the fevered imaginings of the Leader of the Opposition.
The proponents are clear—they are actively seeking an alternate site for this vital piece of infrastructure. From today’s media, it appears they might just have found such a site. They have not abandoned the project; the investment is not lost. Ironically, from what I understand, it may even end up being an even bigger investment than the one originally proposed. Perhaps I can expect a motion of congratulations from the Leader of the Opposition in that event!
The real threat to this investment, as I said earlier, is not anything I have said or done but the careless and cavalier way in which the Leader of the Opposition and his fellow Liberals have used this project as a political pawn. Theirs is a mighty dangerous gamble. What they are engaged upon is anti-business, anti-investment, anti-jobs and anti-innovation scaremongering. It is they who rightfully should be on the receiving end of a motion of censure.
It is the Leader of the Opposition, not I, who has declared open season on investment in Canberra. It is he who has, in seeking to injure me personally, relinquished whatever credentials his party retained as a party that was pro-business. He has let every potential investor in this town know that if there is scope to undermine a
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