Page 1578 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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worth reflecting on the record of this government, and it is worth reflecting on the views of their alliance partners when it comes to sustainable development and also the alternative policies we believe would make for a better Canberra, a Canberra that is planned in a more sustainable way.
Firstly, let us look at the government’s record. The government has not planned for Canberra properly. We can point to any number of examples, but let us take a couple of signature examples of this government where planning has failed and, as a result, Canberrans have paid the price. There is the Gungahlin Drive extension. We know that, if it was up to the Greens, it never would have been built, so that is the Greens’ view on planning for the growth of Gungahlin—they would not have that main arterial route coming into Gungahlin. If it was up to the Greens, people in Gungahlin and going to and from Gungahlin would be suffering even worse traffic chaos than they have suffered until now.
But the Labor Party’s view was that they should only build a road that may have lasted for a few months, it seems. It was only a few months after they built the original extension that they made the decision in a panicked response to the Liberal Party to duplicate the Gungahlin Drive extension.
That failure to plan is not sustainable. That failure to plan has cost the people of Gungahlin dearly in terms of time with their loved ones, productivity, frustration and, of course, financial cost for all Canberrans with the massive blow-out. We know that that was at least $20 million, on the government’s own numbers. It was just thrown away. Twenty million dollars that could have been spent on important community priorities was just thrown away through poor planning.
We see the Cotter Dam in the news again this week because this government keeps racking up a bigger and bigger bill. We can talk about the management failures there, but, in the context of this MPI, let us talk about the planning failures. The Labor Party’s record on water infrastructure is this: for years—even after we had a very significant drought, even after we started to see the prospect of water shortages, even after water restrictions had come into place—we had a government saying to the community, “Well, we don’t need a new dam.” ACT Labor, this cabinet—so Katy Gallagher and Andrew Barr and Simon Corbell—were saying to the community as late as 2006, “We don’t need a dam.” In the height of the drought, with a growing population, they were saying, “We don’t need it.”
That is not sustainable planning. We always knew that as our city grew our water needs would grow. That would necessitate not just doing things more efficiently, which we all agree with, but also having more water. Over time, you need more water. The best way to do that is to store more water. We have seen that failure to plan which is now going to cost taxpayers hundreds of dollars a year on their water bills because ACT Labor did not plan.
They are two fundamental ways in which there has not been sustainable planning. But let us look more directly in the planning sector under Minister Corbell and ACT Labor. It has been Minister Corbell and ACT Labor who have imposed on Canberra families the biggest reduction in the standard of living of this generation through
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