Page 4228 - Week 11 - Thursday, 17 Sept 2009
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did not talk about the new headquarters project for the emergency services. It is because Mr Corbell has such an appalling record on the delivery of these things. We had the GDE promise of “on time, on budget”. Who could forget that?
Of course there is the ACT prison now, the Alexander Maconochie Centre. I do not think I heard him mention that in his speech. I do not think he mentioned the false starts, early openings and false openings. Then of course there was the step-down facility that we announced in March 2001, funded in a budget in 2001 but which was not delivered for five or six years. Then of course there was the new PSU that Mr Corbell announced: “We are going to build a mental health facility with a youth unit.” It still has not happened. I think that was announced in 2005.
It is so hard to keep track of all these numbers and all these things. Then of course there was the busway—the busway to nowhere. What did Mr Hargreaves say? “Over my dead body.” Well, it still has not been built, so it looks like Mr Hargreaves and the right are winning. There will be no busway reward for Mr Corbell. John is simply going to stay alive to stop the busway.
Of course this does lead us to Mr Hargreaves. Mr Hargreaves delivered his speech in the same sort of tone and time frames in which the government has been delivering capital works. He had 15 minutes, but in his sum total of all of the good efforts of the government in delivery of capital works he did not even make 10. You can stand there and assert, but you had an opportunity to detail it all, and again you failed. There was Tharwa bridge and Tharwa Drive.
Then there is the Treasurer and health minister and the Canberra Hospital multistorey car park. The Treasurer is practically the only person in the history of government, probably across the world, who could not make a car park pay. That is a pretty outstanding achievement, given particularly the use of the car in the ACT. Then of course there is Mr Hargreaves’s handling of the upgrade of the airport roads.
You only have to look through this sad litany, Madam Assistant Speaker, to know that this government do not deliver on capital works. They have consistently underspent on capital works, by 37 per cent in 2002-03, by 48 per cent in each of 2004-05 and 2005-06 and by 36 per cent in 2007-08. This is a government that underachieves.
In the four minutes that I have left, let us go to the place that the minister for emergency services dare not go, and that of course would be the new headquarters for the Emergency Services Agency. In a year when in the minister’s own words we face potentially a very dangerous season, this project highlights the ineptitude of the Stanhope-Gallagher government. We have seen the pathetic attempts by Mr Corbell to place all the blame on the former authority, but that is repudiated in the report by the Auditor-General, which catalogues the role of government in decision making for this project.
The Auditor-General also catalogues the cost blow-out on this project, the confusion about the nature of the headquarters and the proposal for three sites for the headquarters in place of the original one site. The point was to bring it all together to get that synergy. We heard Mr Corbell say, “You can’t do hot training for smoke in
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