Page 2724 - Week 07 - Thursday, 3 July 2008
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to increase taxes and charges have added to the bumper harvest of revenue. But we do not have enough to show for all of this unexpected revenue.
Labor promise big in their annual infrastructure budgets, but they have never once, in all their years in office, come close to delivering on their promises. Labor’s capital works underspend was as much as 48 per cent of the promised funding in 2004-05. They promised $247 million, but only delivered $118 million. They also underspent 48 per cent in 2005-06, and we know this from the government’s own secret capital works reports—reports which we are now only able to obtain through FOI requests because the government now refuse to table these reports in the Legislative Assembly. I wonder why.
Of course, we know what the examples are. We know that the Gungahlin Drive extension should have been a two-lane road each way, and it was not. Ms Gallagher sighs because she does not want to hear it, but the reality is that everyone knew, when they decided they would build only one lane each way, that they were neglecting the people of Gungahlin and Belconnen who use that road, because it was never going to be sufficient. It was never going to get it done.
We saw the saga with the Tharwa bridge. In July 2005, Minister John Hargreaves claimed that a new bridge would be needed. On 19 September 2006, Labor closed the bridge because they had failed to take action to make it safe. They waited until 17 January 2007 before they lodged a development application for a new bridge. My colleague Mr Pratt has done a fantastic job in highlighting that this has been another monumental stuff-up.
The other one that we often refer to—and I have already mentioned the apparently on-time and on-budget prison—is the airport roads. This has been a bottleneck that everyone saw coming. We have seen the growth in commonwealth agencies; we have seen the growth in the workforce out at the airport; we have seen the growth in Gungahlin. We have seen all of those things combined, as well as the growth in the eastern corridor with Queanbeyan, yet this government could not see it coming and in fact deferred much of the spending.
The last Liberal government provided money eight years ago in the 2000 budget for duplication of Pialligo Avenue from the airport all the way to the city. Labor inherited the project, but every year it would defer the project. It deferred the project in four successive budgets. Then, in 2006, Labor made the decision to cancel the duplication of Pialligo Avenue between the airport and the city in order to subsidise cost blow-outs on Gungahlin Drive. This is its record, Madam Assistant Speaker.
We have announced, in “infrastructure Canberra”, a plan which will go some way towards improving the situation. You cannot make a government make good decisions. Let us be clear: “infrastructure Canberra” would not have stopped a bone-headed government from making the decision to build only a one-lane GDE, but we certainly can put in place some structural improvements, which this government has refused to do, which would improve the situation significantly.
We have announced a Canberra infrastructure plan. We have announced that, under this plan, we will design and fund infrastructure works to meet the demands of future
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