Page 2768 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
issues. It gives a grab bag of projects that have been budgeted for. In the estimates hearing we asked about the infrastructure plan and the process. I asked how much direct consultation there had been. This is before it was released. Mr Cappie-Wood answered:
Each of the individual agencies in their own right has obviously been speaking with their stakeholder groups, which include industry in some circumstances. So I cannot speak exactly for them because this has been, as the Chief Minister pointed out, a collaborative process where the individual agencies are the ones who come forward with what their projections are in terms of the future infrastructure needs.
I think this goes to the heart of some of the concerns of industry in relation to the development of this plan. Effectively, the government went to each of the agencies and said, “What have you got on and what would you like to put in our infrastructure plan?” There does not appear to have been any genuine coordination and consultation with industry in a comprehensive way where the government was actually listening to industry and saying, “What do we need?”
They talk about some roundtables but when you see that industry is underwhelmed, as they were when this infrastructure plan was delivered, I think it is fair to say that they have not really been listened to. I think it is fair to say that what has been delivered is a substandard product. It is a substandard plan that rightly was widely canned. It is not just because it was error riddled. I think the fact that it had so many errors was simply indicative of the rushed nature, the fact that the work had not been done, the fact that it had not been a comprehensive process.
In the end what we get is a very disappointing document. It is one that does not address the serious infrastructure problems in the territory, the serious infrastructure bottlenecks. It is one that does not deal in any serious way with the infrastructure challenges and how we are going to meet them. How are we going to finance future infrastructure? How will maintenance be dealt with? That is skimmed over. What will be these key projects and how will we get there? What will the city look like? What is our end point? Where do we want to be in 10 years time? Where do we want to be in 20 years time? Where do we want to be in 50 years time? None of those questions are answered by that document.
It remains unclear how much money was spent on the development of that by the government. But what we do know is that what has been produced is something that is not going to be of any real guidance to industry. It is not going to give any real confidence to the community that the kind of infrastructure problems that they are faced with at the moment are going to be fixed. There is a whole range of them. The ones that we focus on, and rightly so because they affect people’s lives, are things like the road bottlenecks.
There will be no confidence from the community that as the territory grows, and it will grow and the region will grow, that the infrastructure will be there to meet it. It is interesting even when you look at what was said in the press yesterday by ordinary members of the community. They were asked their views on population growth and the like. Many of them were not in any way hostile to population growth provided we had the infrastructure to meet it.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video