Page 2100 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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five years late. You only have to look at the Gungahlin Drive extension, which was half the road for twice the price and two years late. You only have to look at the geriatric step-down facility at Calvary, which is about five years late. You only have to look at the Simon Corbell mental health facility that was due to open this year, but that has not even been funded yet.
You only have to look at the busway—millions of dollars spent for a road that will not be built in Mr Hargreaves’s lifetime. You only have to look at the dam. In 2004 it was a disaster; now we are going to build it. But already we are being warned about the blow-out in the cost of it. You only have to look at the roads around the airport, which are an absolute disaster. You only have to look at the cut-down prison. Yes, they were going to build a prison on time, on budget, but we started pulling bits out. There is no gym; there is no chapel. The chapel was out; the chapel was in. We will see what happens.
To cover it all up, they then cut out the capital works program, for the spurious reason that nobody read them or could understand them. My office certainly read them. We loved getting them, because they showed and confirmed, every time there was an initiative in this place, that Labor cannot deliver.
Yes, it is an enormous spend. The money is welcome. It should be spent; it should be spent wisely. But it must be delivered. Don’t put up projects that you know you are not going to deliver. That is the feedback I am getting from the public servants. The government has put this in place knowing full and well that, if they are re-elected, they will not have to deliver it—they can drag it out as they have done so often over the years.
You only have to look at their delivery rates. Their delivery rates on these programs have been appalling. It is sad. It is an indictment of this government that their underspend over the last five years is 37 per cent of budget, 36 per cent of budget, 48 per cent of budget, 48 per cent of budget and 38 per cent of the promised spend. This is a government that does not deliver. If there are two other things that quite simply emerge from this budget, it is that they are spending more but delivering less service and, like so many other typical, big-spending Labor budgets, they throw money at problems instead of coming up with concrete fixes.
In a nutshell, that is what this budget is about. It is about duping the public into believing that they can deliver these things when their record of seven years in government is nothing but indifference on capital works, non-delivery of capital works, under-delivery of capital works, overt spending on capital works and blow-outs of budgets and time frames. Yes, it is an enormous spend, but they cannot deliver because Labor cannot deliver on capital works.
Ms Porter gets up and says things like “Liberal members of the committee squandered their time”. She says we squandered our opportunity. She should have gone and fronted the rally yesterday—the people of Macarthur, Fadden, Isaacs, Torrens and Farrer who were out there. People from Macgregor are now asking about things that we were “squandering our time on” when we revealed that Symonston house was to be moved, when we revealed that there were cabinet meetings, when we revealed that not a single minister could remember when they first had a briefing. There were the
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