Page 5087 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 26 October 2011
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Of course, the flagship disaster, the iconic failure, the headline waste of this government, has been the total mismanagement of the Gungahlin Drive extension. We know that the road was promised 10 years ago at a cost of $53 million. Now, 10 years on, it is near completion at a cost of almost $200 million. As I said in comments in the media last month, how can it be that the GDE took longer to construct than the span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, Melbourne’s CityLink or the M7 freeway?
Let us take a look at those comparisons. Sydney’s Westlink M7 started in 2003 and finished in 2005; it was 40 kilometres long with 38 underpasses and overpasses. The GDE was nine kilometres. The Sydney Harbour Tunnel started in 1988 and finished in 1992. It was a distance of 2.8 kilometres, with a tunnel underneath Sydney Harbour. What about the span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge? It started in 1928 and finished in 1932—again, faster than the Gungahlin Drive extension. What about Melbourne CityLink? It started in 1996 and finished in 2000, with a distance of some 22 kilometres, much of it elevated. In the ACT, we have a road that took longer than each of those projects and is only nine kilometres long.
However, the problems with infrastructure extend far beyond the Gungahlin Drive extension. They extend to many transport issues in the town centre and elsewhere in Gungahlin. As I note in (1)(a) of the motion, the problems extend to parking, roads, traffic management, arterial roads, public transport, footpaths and bike paths. When it comes down to it, there is no part of Gungahlin transport infrastructure that this government has delivered or is delivering well. When we have a suburban area that is located on the city limits with no major employment, the transport links to other parts of the city and internally need to be able to cater for the high demand. Instead, the absolute opposite has occurred.
In my maiden speech in December 2008, with regard to roads in our newer suburbs, I said:
Furthermore; in our new suburbs, we have roads that are so narrow that they bear greater resemblance to an English country lane developed 500 years before the invention of the car than they do to roads that can have one car pass another without side-swiping the pedestrian on the footpath which was never built.
Early in 2009, one of the first letters I wrote to the government on behalf of the Gungahlin community was in response to representations from the business community of the Gungahlin town centre. The concerns they raised with me then centred on safety for both road users and pedestrians. One of their most significant concerns related to a lack of pedestrian crossings at the public library, the family and childcare centre, and Gungahlin Place West. They were also concerned about other poorly marked pedestrian crossings and a poorly placed pedestrian crossing outside the G. I am pleased to say that this letter did prompt some action, albeit very minor, and it did contain an acknowledgement from the former Chief Minister and Minister for Territory and Municipal Services that the current conditions did not factor in in the future growth of the town centre. Mr Stanhope said:
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