Page 4040 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 16 Sept 2009
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MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.55): I would like to touch on some of what Mr Rattenbury had to say before I deal with Mr Corbell’s amendment and some of the contribution he made to the debate.
Mr Rattenbury raised a number of good and important issues in terms of the cost blow-out and the detail of it. One issue that he may have touched on—I did not quite hear him—was: has there been mismanagement that has actually led to cost blow-outs? That is going to be difficult to get to the bottom of. We do not know.
All of these questions have to be asked because there are cost blow-outs based on underestimation, there are cost blow-outs based on increases in materials or changes in scope, and there are also potentially cost blow-outs as a result of not managing the project well—spending money on administration when you should not be. That is unclear at this point. We do not have the inside knowledge on that, but the government should. They should be asking a lot of questions about the management of this project because it is such a monumental blow-out. We are not talking about a little bit of extra concrete, a little bit of a delay or a little bit of an increase in the cost of materials. We are talking about a threefold increase. We are talking about a project that was going to cost $120 million and that is now costing $363 million and counting.
It is interesting to look at Mr Corbell’s contribution to this debate. In fact, even the fact that it is Mr Corbell who is contributing on behalf of the government is interesting. The government is now desperate to move this away from a management issue, from a cost blow-out issue, to a debate about water. He is trying to create a false debate, because what we have had is the government finally coming on board regarding the need for water security. So there is no debate between the major parties at least on the issue of more water storage in order to create some water security for the territory. Mr Corbell would like to make it about that, to try and shield Ms Gallagher and Mr Stanhope from their responsibilities in particular as shareholders, and, indeed, Ms Gallagher as the minister responsible for the operations of Actew. This is a management issue.
In talking about water, Mr Corbell displayed some embarrassment, and we saw the defensiveness in Mr Corbell’s presentation. He seemed to spend most of his time talking about the opposition rather than the government. And that is not surprising, given the terrible record on securing our water supply that we have seen from this government in recent years. Everything has been done reactively. Mr Corbell talks about the fact that they did this and that in 2004 and 2005, but that was all about putting off the inevitable decision. All of those things were about putting off the inevitable decision that we all knew we would get to, but which has now been delayed by years and years—and, indeed, it is now blowing out by hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars.
We saw what the Chief Minister had to say on the issue. He summed up what these other measures were about: they were stopgaps; they were not solutions. Just three years ago, he said that the strategy was to—and I quote:
… put off for as long as we possibly can … the construction of another dam. If we can put it off forever, what a fantastic achievement by the ACT government that would be.
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