Page 2723 - Week 07 - Thursday, 3 July 2008
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one-bed facility, you could have really saved the taxpayer a lot of money. We could have come in well under budget! It is a ridiculous thing to say. It has come in over budget and under spec. That is what you have got with the prison, so that is Mr Corbell’s infrastructure record—empty buildings at the airport costing $170,000 a month and a prison that is over budget and below the spec that was given initially.
Since Labor came to office, the ACT government has received a cumulative windfall of revenue at least $1.673 billion greater than it was expecting at budget time. Windfall revenue has averaged a massive $279 million a year or close to 10 per cent of total expected government income. Total ACT government revenue has rocketed from around $2 billion when Mr Stanhope came in to over $3 billion today. So the ACT government has seen over $1 billion more in revenue every year.
The Stanhope government has failed in infrastructure spending in three significant ways. First, it had considerable capacity to increase its spending on capital works but it has been spending less than is needed. Second, it is not meeting its own budget promises for infrastructure spending. It is underspending by a half to a third of promised work. Third, it has still failed to develop an effective capital works strategy to ensure that bottlenecks are anticipated and prevented ahead of time.
There has been a very dramatic need for increased infrastructure spending in Canberra since 2001. Over the past seven years, the commonwealth government has created thousands of new jobs in Canberra but the local Labor government has failed to keep pace by building infrastructure to cope with growth. Some commonwealth agencies have grown significantly in size. For example, the Australian Federal Police budget has grown threefold since 2001 and the intelligence agencies have also been expanded massively.
The growth in commonwealth activity did not arrive without warning. Thousands of new jobs were announced each year in the commonwealth budget, but Jon Stanhope has failed to plan for the extra demand on local infrastructure. He has let numerous infrastructure bottlenecks develop under his watch. As you mentioned, Madam Assistant Speaker, not very long ago journeys to work of over 40 minutes were unthinkable in Canberra. The NRMA said that in 2001, when Labor came to office, it inherited a good road network. But under the reign of the Stanhope government we have seen traffic congestion become a reality. We have seen the bottlenecks, particularly around the airport and in other areas, and we have seen the apparent fix, which is a one-lane GDE which has not solved the problem and has left Gungahlin and Belconnen residents sitting in traffic for much longer than should be the case, because this government simply could not get it done.
Canberra has the economic capacity at this time in our history to invest in our major infrastructure. The ACT government has three significant generators of above-average revenue. First, soaring property prices have brought windfall stamp duty receipts and hundreds of millions from land sales. Of course, when you sell assets such as land, you should be investing it in infrastructure, and we have seen massive windfall gains from commercial and residential property during the life of this government. Second, GST receipts have been above what was expected when this consumption tax was given over to the states and territories. Third, decisions by the ACT Labor government
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