Page 1887 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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Mr Corbell interjecting—
MR SESELJA: We hear from Mr Corbell again. Again he claims in this place that he delivered the prison on budget. It started off as $110 million. It went to $128 million. Then it went to $131 million. Then they cut beds. Then they cut the chapel. Then they cut the gym. But Mr Corbell says, “It’s on budget, it’s on budget.” If you cut it enough and expand the budget enough, eventually it will be on budget. You could have dropped it to no beds; then you would have delivered it on budget. My goodness! Canberrans are now paying an extraordinary price for this prison: $504 per prisoner per day. Yet, as we have seen with recent publicity, we are not getting what we paid for or what we were promised. We cannot keep prisoners safe inside the prison and we cannot stop people who are supposed to be there from just walking out the door.
We would not have wasted the chance to collect revenue owing to us. This is not a poor policy choice—just appalling management practice. They simply did not get around to collecting money. They forgot.
We would not be wasting up to $7½ million on buses going nowhere every year. That is $27,726 every single work day for the ACT taxpayers. It gets us absolutely nothing. We would not be wasting millions renting empty buildings, and more millions on busway plans that were doomed to fail.
We would not have spent $5 million on FireLink, a communications facility which was never delivered. Mr Corbell’s woes continue. The legacy of waste is a fact for which all Canberra families will foot the bill.
The next question we are inevitably faced with is: where are the savings? Frankly, this budget is awash with waste, and here are just a few examples. Let us take the $4.25 million for the planning, study and construction around Northbourne Avenue. I do not know how much it is for the study to tell you Northbourne Avenue does not work very well. But I will tell you right now, for free: it does not. How much have we saved just then?
You are spending $100,000 for a feasibility study for one shopfront in Gungahlin. The centre of Gungahlin is nothing but shops. What about Gungahlin shops is unfeasible? Pick one and move in.
There is $3.1 million in planning and documentation for the highly questionable government office projects—not building the offices or moving in; just planning and paper.
There is $8 million for Treasury for land release—not for ACTPLA, not for LDA; for the Treasury department, presumably to count all the money raised by selling the land. Surely this is core business for all of these departments.
You finally realised that you can cut the Treasurer’s slush fund by 25 per cent. Well, why not make it 50 per cent? Based on historical measures, that could be up to $21 million a year.
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