Page 3073 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 August 2008
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MR PRATT: But these budget papers very clearly indicate the Humphries government’s intentions for what was a four-lane road for the full length.
Mr Hargreaves: It is not the full length.
MR PRATT: You, my dear chap, are standing there swinging in the breeze, entirely exposed. Maybe you had better go and look for that loincloth which is flapping around behind you.
Mrs Dunne: You have to remember what Mr Corbell promised—on time, on budget.
MR PRATT: That is right: on time, on budget and four lanes. Yes, sure! I want to look at the litany of failures that have occurred over this long sojourn that we have seen with respect to the Gungahlin Drive extension. I will give a number of examples. On 3 May 2005, we said in this place that ongoing delays to the construction of the GDE had cost ACT taxpayers a whopping $16 million in additional funding. This is a measurement of how things have progressed. In the 2004-05 budget, the project was costed at a total of $70 million then. In the 2005-06 budget, as we raised in this place on 3 May 2005, it was then going to cost $86 million. So even then there was a $16 million blow-out.
Of course, the government argued that this was out of their control, due to the ongoing legal challenges launched by the Save the Ridge group. We quite cleverly and accurately counterargued at that time that if the Stanhope government had provided the proper environmental impact studies and reports in the first place, and had not spent so long messing around with the eastern and western route alignments, the whole process, as at 3 May 2005, would not have been dragged out. So there is the first example of this government’s passion fingers in relation to the Gungahlin Drive extension.
On 29 November 2005, we pointed out, here and publicly, that the 2005-06 September quarter capital works progress report showed that the completion date for the Gungahlin Drive extension had been pushed out by a further nine months. The report tabled in the Assembly then showed that the new completion date for the GDE was going to be June 2008. That was in stark contrast to the September 2007 completion date shown in the 2005-06 budget papers which I referred to a moment ago, and the 2004-05 June quarter capital works progress report. All the time, the government is making excuses—delay, delay delay—and adding to the budget, because those delays were also becoming costly.
In November 2005, Mr Hargreaves admitted that the planned upgrades to Majura Road and Pialligo Avenue had been postponed indefinitely following the massive $73 million cost blow-out for the Gungahlin Drive extension. So on 10 and 11 November we again saw the government’s incompetence, demonstrated by the fact that it was then saying, “Oh dear, we’ve had another cost blow-out. We’re going to have to cancel Majura Road and Pialligo Avenue.”
The minister also confirmed that “numerous other small roadworks” had been shelved to accommodate the GDE blow-out. So the hunt for his five-year road plan, which
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