Page 34 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
$34 million a year in savings for the government.” If that was true then, they are now saying to the community: “We do not want to find $34 million in savings. We are walking away from this project.”
We think they should walk away from this project, but not because there is $34 million in savings. It is precisely because there is not $34 million in savings. It is a poor use of capital and they should walk away from it. They have wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money pursuing this project. How many consultants have been engaged to pursue this project?
We heard the Deputy Chief Minister on radio saying: “All of that work would have been done anyway. We would have done all of the analysis about owning this building. We would have done all this design work about our ministerial wing. We would not have given that over to, say, the private sector and then rented it from them.” No, they were going to do all this anyway. Millions upon millions of dollars have been wasted by Katy Gallagher and Andrew Barr in pursuing a flawed project.
Madam Deputy Speaker, the reason they should be censured is the two aspects to this. It is good that they have walked away from this project. They never should have gone there in the first place. But the reason for the censure is that by pursuing something which blind Freddy could see was a bad idea, they wasted millions of dollars. That is millions of dollars that could have been spent on core local services and they chose to waste it on a vanity project.
Secondly, they did not tell the truth. In order to justify the indefensible, they went out and they made up figures. They concocted numbers. There are ways that we know that for sure. Apart from the fact that we were able to look at this A4 piece of paper and say, “This is shoddy; this does not stack up.” Then there were all sorts of statements: “We will produce this document. We have got some different savings over here. By the way, we did not take this into account.” It did not stack up. It smelt. We knew it. They walked away the day after Australia Day, the day before the weekend in the middle of, effectively, a long weekend, in order to bury this because they are embarrassed.
What are they embarrassed about? Are they embarrassed about the backflip and the fact that what they said was the most important project for the territory can now just be shelved? Or are they embarrassed about the misleading information that they gave to the community? There is no doubt that it is misleading. If Mr Barr or Ms Gallagher want to get up and defend this, they will have to say that they are walking away from a project that would apparently save taxpayers $34 million a year, that they would look after public servants and that they would be able to invest all of that extra $34 million a year into other projects. They cannot have it both ways. Either they were not telling the truth in the first place or, if they were telling the truth, they are now choosing to go down a more expensive path.
I suspect the first is true. I think all of the evidence shows that the first is true. We could see it as we did the analysis. As we asked questions, it started to unravel. It started, Mr Speaker, with a lie—a bad project backed up by lies. They said they would—
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video