Page 1005 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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machinery and other issues that have arisen out there—the timber stacking up on the dam wall and those sorts of things. Clearly, there are going to be some cost issues attached to that which, to be fair, are probably difficult to predict and therefore probably do come as an additional cost. It is one of those what they call “acts of God” in insurance policies.
That said, the Greens do support the intent and direction of Mrs Dunne’s motion today. I think that residents do have a right to be kept informed of both the budget and the time line for this project. Particularly given the history of it, it is critically important that there is transparency around both of those matters. As I said, we have seen adjustment coming even before the recent very significant rain event. So we support Mrs Dunne’s motion today in the broad sense.
My office had been having discussions with Mrs Dunne’s office about some further amendments to Mr Barr’s amendment. We had some concern with Mrs Dunne’s original motion in that I felt that having to report at the beginning of every sitting period was perhaps unnecessarily onerous and not necessarily the most accurate time to gather information—that it may, in fact, be creating a bunch of work that did not necessarily provide an update to us.
That is when Mr Barr brought forward his amendment. We started thinking that was perhaps a more practical way to do it. I was concerned by the open-ended time lines. We started to work up some amendments that removed phrases such as “as soon as practicable” and instead inserted “within five working days of the Actew board making a revised decision” just so there were some very specific time frames. We can all think of the examples where things that are to be done as soon as practicable end up taking rather longer than we might have anticipated. I think it is appropriate to put more specific time lines on that.
Mrs Dunne has picked that up in the amendment she has moved. I will not be moving my amendments because I think that Mrs Dunne, in her amendment, has now brought together both the positive impacts of Mr Barr’s amendment and some of the ideas we had. I think it is all contained there. We have found a way through. I will be very pleased to support Mrs Dunne’s amendment to Mr Barr’s amendment.
There are some really important questions to be raised here. I have spoken already about the softening up that I think was taking place. We may need to give some further thought, Mrs Dunne, to your amendment because what has come out now is that Mr Barr has said there was a board meeting due to take place on 4 March. That is when the rain event kicked in. Mrs Dunne has just said that her understanding was that there was a revised budget to be put to that meeting on the 4th and the decision was never taken. It all got put off because there was clearly a recognition that that was not going to be a valid figure anymore.
However, Mr Barr in his amendment has in some ways anticipated Mrs Dunne’s motion. In part (1)(d) of Mr Barr’s amendment he says that the total project budget as at 1 March 2012 was $363 million. I suspect that is true. I suspect that on 4 March, particularly in light of what Mrs Dunne has just said, the board was set to determine a new budget and to make some decision. Mrs Dunne, we might need to give this some thought because part (a) of your amendment says:
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