Page 2237 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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This is going to be $300 million by the time it is completed. Let us face it: the costs will undoubtedly increase. They always seem to. So we are talking about $300 million here. The Liberals, who sit on the other side of the chamber, scream blue murder in here about the scrutiny of $10,000 and the like. This is $300 million. We need to look at whether this is the best investment that we can make to solve the transport problems for the people of Gungahlin and the north side of Canberra. Our argument is that there is a more cost-effective way to solve those transport problems, and that is a two-pronged strategy—a strategy to upgrade Majura Road to the standard to make it safe and to provide the improvements that will improve traffic flows for the traffic that obviously is flowing down that road already.
The second part of that strategy is to invest in high volume public transport that will service the people of Gungahlin in particular with the sort of transport options and services that they deserve. That is what the Greens’ position is. One of our primary concerns in this debate is the false promises. The two false promises are that this road will solve the problems, and the second is some vague promise from the government that they are going to do something about public transport—that they are going to build light rail.
I am going to discuss in some detail those two issues. Ms Bresnan has gone through in some details the issues around induced traffic, the issues around the fact that the more roads you build, the more people drive on them. That is a well-recognised, well-studied, well-documented, peer-reviewed issue that has been identified by researchers all over the world.
As I have said, the Greens do see that there is obviously a role for cars in our transport system. No-one in our team disputes that, despite all the verballing that this chamber might seek to put upon us. No-one disputes that. The question is: will simply building more roads solve the problem or are we going to lock ourselves into a car-dependent future?
When it comes to building light rail, we have had promise after promise after promise. But the reality—and there is the point Ms Bresnan was making about emphasising the distortion of budget funding toward road building—is that we always seem to find the money for roads. We never, ever seem to find the significant money that is required for investment in public transport.
I do not know how long people in this city have talked about the need for light rail from Gungahlin to the city. In the government’s own documentation that they have put to Infrastructure Australia—funnily enough just before the 2008 elections so that everyone thought they were serious about it—they identified the cost of light rail from Gungahlin to Civic at $86 million. The estimate was $86 million.
Admittedly, that figure was part of a broader network. It was a whole picture. So you can make an assumption that if it was done as a stand-alone, you would lose some economies of scale from not building the whole system. But that is $86 million. We have never, ever found that money. We found $300 million for the GDE, we found $300 million for Majura parkway, or at least we are trying to, and yet we cannot find
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