Page 1775 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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It was not the right road to build in the first place. So I wonder how the 45,000 people who live in Gungahlin are meant to get to work, how they are meant to get into this grandiose office project across the road that is going to cost $430 million that the Greens have given a rubber stamp to. I wonder how they are going to travel, if they are not able to use the Gungahlin Drive extension, the road the Greens did not want to build. How can they spend any time out in Gungahlin? How can they pretend to represent the people of Gungahlin and also say they do not deserve the Gungahlin Drive extension? I think that too is indicative of this coalition and indicative, in particular, of what the Greens’ stance is on families in our suburbs.
In estimates last year, it was revealed that the way the government had gone about doing their business by creating a single-lane road in each direction and then duplicating it was probably going to cost in the vicinity of $20 million. It was a political decision, by cabinet, to build a single-lane road and then duplicate it. And that was a cynical exercise in itself.
Of course, it was the Liberals who had announced that we were going to go for a dual carriageway, and we took that to the 2008 election. And seeing the political opportunity, Jon Stanhope and the Labor Party jumped on the bandwagon and said: “We too will duplicate it. We’ll make it two lanes in each direction.” However, the director of Roads ACT confirmed in May 2009 in estimates that the road would probably be in the vicinity of 10 per cent more expensive, or $20 million, because of the way they had chosen to construct it.
The opposition firmly believes that this cost blow-out was avoidable. If the road had been constructed properly the first time and constructed as a dual carriageway, we would not have that cost blow-out of $20 million. There is a fair chance it would have cost, I think, in excess of $100 million less—much less. And that is being very conservative. It could well be $150 million less, if you go by the government’s own valuation as at the time of the 2001 election of $53 million.
Again, this is real money. Mr Stanhope is probably going to jump up here and say: “That’s money we didn’t have to spend back then. Therefore, we wouldn’t have had other capital projects.” The fact is that at the time of completion it is going to be in excess of $20 million. That is the cost of the decision making Mr Stanhope has made. That is $20 million of other infrastructure in Canberra that has been forgone because of the political decisions made by cabinet.
You only need to listen to talkback radio for an hour or two when they are talking about roadworks or pick up just about any copy of the Canberra Times to read references made to the Gungahlin Drive extension and to the problems that people are experiencing. Of course, there are issues with the actual road surface. When we had the heavy rain back in December and January, the road pretty much fell apart and many cars suffered quite serious damage. In actual fact, the government paid out a number of motorists because they did, in effect, say that they were contributing to the problems caused to their cars. They, of course, did not actually admit the liability but they did cough up 50 per cent to at least one person I know and perhaps to others as well.
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