Page 3579 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010

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Question so resolved in the negative.

Amendment negatived.

MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (8.02): I rise to close this debate, so I will make a few comments on what my colleagues said. Thank you very much, Mr Coe, Mr Hargreaves and Ms Gallagher for your contributions to this. I totally appreciate the point made by Ms Gallagher and Mr Hargreaves that our roads do need maintaining. Nobody is disputing that. What we are saying, though, is that, as well as needing maintaining, they also need planning for the future.

We were quoted examples of three studies the government had quite sensibly done, which talked about what should happen to our roads for the future. But what happened, in fact, was that we just rebuilt the roads in the same way, even though we had parts of the same department planning and saying that the roads should be different. So we do not disagree that the roads need maintenance. We disagree about where and when you do those.

Mr Hargreaves, we are not condemning the government for all the things that it is doing. We are condemning the government for not taking into account its own planning, for not taking into account the planning that it is doing. In many cases it has got it right in the planning but it has not yet got it right in the implementation. There are many things that this government has done well but there are things that it has not done well.

I would also say that we were not making any comment on the ACT public servants who, I think, are doing a very fine job. The issue is short term versus long term and planning for the future rather than just putting a bit of tar on and putting the road back exactly the same as it was before.

There has been about $5 million spent on each of Bunda Street, London Circuit and Northbourne Avenue. Each of these streets currently has redesign options for it before the government. I fear that what is going to happen is that these expensive roadworks will mean that we have spent so much money on maintenance that the government feels it does not actually have the money to do the full improvement, the full plan, which will be in the planning work the government is currently doing, in particular, the greater Civic plan, which I am sure everyone in this Assembly eagerly awaits.

While I have got a few minutes, I point out a few other pieces of evidence for my claims that road upgrades sometimes suffer from a lack of planning. The Auditor-General’s report on budget initiatives said:

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