Page 1062 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 2013
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going to do this as part of their plan, and it is how they are going to essentially provide the modern beds and infrastructure that we need in our health system. And now we are finding this confusion. The minister does not know whether she is going ahead or not, in what form it is going to go ahead and whether the design is going to go ahead. It has all stopped.
What is quite ironic is that the government now, particularly this minister, are talking about doing it all at Calvary, because Calvary is going to be our saviour now. You probably remember, Mr Assistant Speaker, if you wind the clock back to 2009, that it was revealed that this government wanted to take Calvary over, and there were comments from the Labor Party about Calvary being left to wither and die on the vine. That is the regard they had for Calvary. They could not do things at Calvary because it was not part of the systems approach they had and they wanted to get it into public hands. It could not do the job. They had to do it all at TCH because they could not trust Calvary. And now it has all turned 180 degrees. It is a complete backflip on what they were saying before.
This is what we were saying in this place in 2009, 2010, 2011: you have got a perfectly good precinct at Bruce, you have got a great hospital there, you have got Little Company of Mary doing the job; let us do something there. And the government was resistant to that.
What the minister said today—and I do not think she said it on Friday–was that part of this is about pressure on the budget. We know there are deficits in the outyears of $575 million. There is $2.7 billion in borrowings, and she is looking at the available capital in the budget as a whole. So basically, she is saying, “Oh, dear, have we got enough money for this? Because we have got a lot of other stuff we want to do. What else do we want to do? Light rail at any cost.” So they have got their $600 million for the first tranche of light rail—and I refer you to the Greens’ policy, because they want to have it all over Canberra; light rail everywhere. This is just the first tranche, which is $600 million. God knows what the full cost of light rail is under this Greens-Labor coalition.
So what the government is saying now is, “Oops, we’ll look at what’s available because we haven’t got enough money in the whole budget if we are going to pay for light rail to keep Mr Rattenbury on side. We need Mr Rattenbury on side if we’re going to stay in government.” You can start to see a little bit of a pattern emerging here.
As Mr Smyth alluded to with some of his concerns about light rail, let us not think that this is about a transport system that we need, and the question I raise is: why are we doing this? This is why we are going to do so much work investigating light rail, because when you look at the Greens’ policy—this is a quote from Amanda Bresnan—“Light rail is convenient”—well, maybe, maybe not—“cost effective”—I doubt it—“quiet and low carbon.” Low carbon, Mr Assistant Speaker, and there you have it. If you want to be the greenest jurisdiction in Australia, which is what Shane Rattenbury wants us to be, then he has got to have light rail. And Simon Corbell and those on the Labor left who are desperate to out-green Shane Rattenbury—they want to be the most extreme government in Australia—have to have some low carbon
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