Page 1813 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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planning decisions, we would be enjoying this roadway today. The good people of Gungahlin and others that use that road would be driving now on a road that was not congested and was not so plagued by the problems that it has, particularly at peak times. They would be driving on an unblocked, two-lane road, they would have been doing so for years and we would have had far less cost impact upon our budget.
It was this government that first committed to building the road back in 2001 and at that stage they said it was going to cost us $53 million. How much is it going to cost? The government still cannot tell us what the final cost will be, but over 10 years later it is about $200 million. There is a figure in the budget of, I think, $194 million or so. But, given the cost blow-outs and the delays in this project, until it is finished I am loath to say that that is what the cost of this project will be because this, amongst many other projects that this government has delivered or failed to deliver, has been plagued by cost overruns.
What we do know, though, is the cost of the artwork along the way. That is $750,000, I believe, for the artwork on the side of the road. Mr Stanhope accuses anybody who might not like that artwork or who thinks it is not a high priority and who would have preferred to see that money allocated to perhaps duplication of the road at an earlier stage as being a redneck or a philistine who is engaging in some tiresome debate. So, as the people of Gungahlin sit in their cars that are stationary or crawling along, they look at that public art and think of those words from Mr Stanhope and their anger just increases.
The government seem to think that taking 10 years to build a road is a model of planning and they are always lauding how well they are doing with infrastructure. Certainly they spend a lot of money—no-one questions that—and this road is going to be delivered for about four times the cost originally estimated. Mr Stanhope said in 2001 that we would have a two-lane road built by 2004 at a cost of $53 million, but he did not actually sign the first contract until after that date, until November 2005. So a year after the project was due to be delivered as a two-lane road the government had not even signed the contract. It is just a mockery. And the second contract was not signed until May 2006, two years after the road was originally scheduled to be finished.
The final one-lane road was complete in April 2008 but that was four years overdue and at a cost of $120 million. And, importantly, it is a road that as it was delivered was already over capacity. That was not a surprise to anyone, least of all to the government. They had been told that it would be over capacity. The urban services engineering feasibility study into the GDE conducted in June 2002 told them that “GDE will be busy upon opening and that widening to four lanes will need to be considered soon after the opening of the initial construction”. So they knew back in 2002 that this road was going to be full when they opened it.
Does that remind you of anything, Madam Assistant Speaker? I reflect on the jail, another great infrastructure project delivered by the Labor government, another infrastructure program that on the day it opened was already full. And they knew that was the case. They had reduced it in scope, as they did with this. They reduced this road from two lanes to one, they reduced the jail from 374 beds to 300, and told the
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