Page 783 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
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The government’s still unfinished 2007 draft parking strategy shows their intent to make car parking harder by reducing the number of parking spaces from eight for every 10 workers to five, with more short-stay spaces but fewer long stay.
They are some of the policies that we know about, but what is there coming down the track? There is the car sharing policy that we talked about yesterday. The Greens-Labor parliamentary agreement includes that car sharing policy. Paragraph 2.8 of the policy states:
Introduce a ‘car sharing’ policy by the end of 2013 and complementary changes to planning and parking regulation …
What are those complementary changes to parking regulations? You can bet your bottom dollar it will be a price increase. We have things like the stand-alone birthing centre. The Chief Minister has agreed to a stand-alone birthing centre study. It was in the Greens’ policies. The Treasury costed that study at $300,000. The minister, during the election campaign, said that she did not agree with the stand-alone birthing centre, but she is going to do a study anyway.
So she is being dragged along her merry way by our most extreme, most progressive government in Australia. We are doing a study, the outcome of which the government has already said it does not agree with, which has been costed by their own Treasury at $300,000. What a bizarre piece of policy! And what is the cost of that, the cost of buying off the Greens in the parliamentary agreement? It is another $300,000 that could have been far better spent in the community.
What else is changing? The Greens have stated that they do not support first home owners grants and that they are supportive of mileage-based car user fees, whatever that means. They are not just putting pressure on the budget. They are going to put pressure on families.
Light rail is coming down the track, pardon the pun, Madam Speaker. The $1 billion that we see in the Greens-Labor agreement and in the costed Labor policies does not include the $614 million for construction of light rail. If we follow any Labor government infrastructure project—we think of the GDE, we look at the dam—it is very unlikely that it will be delivered anywhere near that $614 million.
What I would like to say to you is that this is going to be delivered at any cost. I will refer to recent hearings where questions were asked by Mr Smyth. I will give you a quote from the PAC committee hearing on 21 February on the cost of light rail. Mr Smyth, in speaking to Minister Barr, said, “So whatever the numbers turn up, it is going ahead?” Minister Barr replied, “Yes, we are committed to this project.” Later, Mr Smyth asked, “Is there any price at which this project will not go ahead?” The minister said, “No.”
So basically at any price, at any price regardless of the cost to the ACT community, this will be delivered. What is that cost going to be? We can extrapolate, we can guess, but what we do know is that it is going to put further pressure on our ACT budget and further pressure on households.
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