Page 2176 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 22 June 2010
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have two major concerns: are they the right projects and are we actually creating infrastructure or are we just budgeting to spend money?
Let me go to the subject of whether we are just creating infrastructure or just budgeting to spend money. The Auditor-General recently released a report which found that in 2007-08 and 2008-09 agencies did not perform well in the implementation of capital initiatives. About 45 per cent of selected projects were not completed on time and within budget. Agencies spent less than 50 per cent of the funds provided during the years under review. The Auditor-General goes through the reasons for this, but says that it is largely due to lack of planning and project management. That is one issue. As well as budgeting, we need to actually spend the money—and spend it on time and on what we plan to spend it on.
The other issue is this: are we planning to do the right projects? Are we choosing big infrastructure projects but sometimes ignoring the non-big capital expenditures, the non-big hardware things—ones where expenditure might be more effective? We tend to measure the government’s performance by saying that they are spending X dollars on solving some problem. What we really should be looking at is how they are addressing the problem and whether they are solving it. Expenditure on water is an example of this. The government are spending a lot of money on big engineering projects, but we need to keep working on demand management. We have got a growing population; if we do not keep working on the softer stuff, the demand management, it will not work.
We also need to ensure that Canberra becomes more efficient with our resources. There is projected to be massive growth in the local population. It is projected that the population in the region will grow to 434,000 in 2030. We also predict major environmental changes. We expect that Canberra is going to become hotter and drier, with more extreme weather events.
When we Greens talk about long-term planning infrastructure, we think that we should be planning 50 years out. We want to make sure that in 50 years time the infrastructure is still what we want and has served us for those 50 years. This is only a 10-year infrastructure plan. That is not long enough for long-term infrastructure. The Cotter Dam, the roads, the schools, the hospitals—we all expect that they will still be here in 10 years time or 50 years time. We need to make sure that they are planned for that far ahead.
For example, we want to build our housing to be adaptable, with universal designs so that we can accommodate our ageing population over the next decades. We need to plan our transport system to be useable for decades ahead. There is considerable debate, I agree, about when peak oil is going to occur; but I think that everybody would agree that it will certainly be in the next 50 years and almost certainly in the next 10 years. What is our transport planning doing? If you believe this document, it is planning on the basis that cars will still be the dominant form of transport in the ACT. It is very hard to believe that that will be true, given peak oil and given climate change.
But even disregarding that from a transport point of view, let us look at cities like Melbourne. They are using trams. They are using the same trams they have been using for decades. What are we doing in Canberra?
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