Page 1449 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
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Now Labor wants to spend $7½ million on one childcare centre in Dixon Drive, Holder, creating up to 125 places. So 3½ years later, Labor, in typical style, will deliver one childcare centre at almost twice the promised budget allocated for two childcare centres. No wonder they could only deliver on half their promises.
On top of that, Labor is budgeting almost half a million dollars a year in depreciation and recurrent expenditure costs. Then, of course, there is the opportunity cost of the lost revenue in terms of the potential sale of the land.
I think we should contrast it with the new childcare centre built in Harrison by Northside Community Service, at a cost of around $3 million, which created 108 childcare places. And a bit of simple arithmetic will tell you that $7½ million on 125 places equals $60,000 per place, and $3 million on 108 places equals just under $28,000 per place. This is a substantial difference and one of the issues of greatest concern to me about the government’s proposal.
We also need to compare the $400,000 per new place at Flynn. We have to remember that this was not a building, this was a refurb of an existing building. We also have to remember that when the government refurbished part of the old Spence primary school to create extra places for the Baringa Childcare Centre, they spent about $30,000 per place for the infant centre when they already had a building. That, again, was a refurbishment. So the government are not actually very good at creating childcare places in a cost-effective manner.
The community sector has once again demonstrated that it can do things better than this government. In this case, it can deliver a childcare centre at less than half the cost per place than the government proposes to deliver. Perhaps the government should just give the capital works money to the community sector and ask it to deliver its 2008 promise of two new childcare centres. It probably could have done it. My motion does not seek to do much more than draw attention to this fact. Clearly this government is unable to deliver on infrastructure projects.
There are real problems with the delivery of this project at Weston Creek. My advice, as recently as last week, is that although there has been a lot of development work done and there is, in fact, a development application being put out, a lot of the development work has to go back to taws because of some problems with the planning. They have created such a problem with the car access to the battleaxe block behind the childcare centre on Dixon Drive, which is notionally going to be provided to Communities@Work for some service provision that they want to do on that site, and with parking on the childcare site that all the planning has gone back to the drawing board and the whole thing has to start from taws.
It is my understanding that there is in excess of six months work backwards and forwards between the minister’s directorate, who have been dealing with some planning issues in this area, and the recipient of the battleaxe block. And it was only when senior officials of Communities@Work directly approached the minister and the chief executive that they realised that they do have a problem, that there are significant problems in relation to the battleaxe block, and it all has to go back to taws.
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