Page 1814 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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community it would be okay, all the time knowing that on the opening of these infrastructure programs they would be already full and then they would have to retrofit.
That costs us money and it causes people aggravation and delay. The government is doing it for the road and it is going to do it for the jail. Money is in the budget this year for scoping to work out how it is going to try and fix those infrastructure problems, those capacity issues, it has at the jail. So this is clearly a government that has not learned, that continues to repeat the same problems. And it is not just the experts who say that; certainly the community do. The Gungahlin Community Council spokesperson is reported to have said to the ABC:
“The entire community’s been saying that not duplicating it from day one was a silly move,” he said.
“I think if there’s any disappointment, it’s disappointment that it’s taken so long.”
So we already knew in 2002 that it was not going to have the capacity, and the Canberra Liberals were saying this. We said it was not going to have the capacity. We then in 2008, in the lead-up to the election, took this as a policy. And I remember this clearly because this was going to be a significant policy announcement for the Canberra Liberals. We had the front page of the CityNews. That got to the Labor Party on the evening before and they came out with a panicked, rushed policy announcement, a backflip, an utter backflip, and said, “We are going to do it—us too, me too,” because they knew that the Canberra Liberals were right. We have been right all along, and it is very clear that the only reason we have this road that is now being duplicated is because the Canberra Liberals drove this as an issue in the 2008 election.
The delays that we have seen have been inexcusable and the money that it has cost the community has been inexcusable and quite unnecessary. According to the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics, during the time between promising to build the extension and the first actual signing of contracts, the road construction and maintenance costs increased by 28 per cent. So the delays that we have seen, the procrastination, the failure to actually build a road with any vision, has cost ACT taxpayers enormous amounts of money, millions and millions of dollars.
Hopefully we will get this road duplicated. I think the time frame is about March or April next year. But, given this government’s record, we still have to wait and see if that is actually going to occur. They have let us down. I have already mentioned the AMC, but we can look at recent projects, like the hospital car park that blew its budget and is well over time and the women and children’s hospital, to see that when it comes to almost any infrastructure project this government is incapable of delivering anything on time or on budget.
Their Greens colleagues certainly have got a different approach to the GDE. They never wanted the road. They were worried about some environmental issue. I am not quite sure what it was but the quote from Meredith Hunter was:
That is probably a straightforward one for the Greens. We did not believe that was the right road to build in the first place …
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