Page 1328 - Week 04 - Thursday, 8 May 2014
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get rolled over into the next financial year because the government did not get their act together in terms of getting on with the job and doing what they said they would in the previous year’s budget.
Yesterday I spoke about a few of the issues, a few of the litany of problems that the government has had by way of infrastructure problems. Of course, the secure mental health facility is one. It is already up to $25 million and it is still not there. Tharwa bridge took years and years and the cost went up and up. The ESA headquarters blew out by tens of millions of dollars. And the mother of all infrastructure failures was, of course, the Cotter Dam. We still do not have a final figure for the Cotter Dam. It would be interesting to know whether the government has that figure yet.
The dam wall was originally going to cost $120 million and then it went up and up and up: $363 million, $390 million, $404 million. Currently, I think it is at about $411 million or $412 million. It will be fascinating to see what the Auditor-General finds as a result of her extensive investigations into this issue. I would not be at all surprised if the Auditor-General finds that perhaps there were not the time penalties that there should have been in that contract. Perhaps, in fact, there was an incentive for the alliance to go slow on that project. It will be very interesting if the Auditor-General makes that finding.
Of course, the full contract, the full TOC, is not available, I do not believe, to the public. Therefore there are certain elements—I would say some of the important elements—which it is very important for us to see. I hope that the Auditor-General has been able to get to the bottom of why the costs spiralled so much, especially from $363 million to $411 million, with costs that cannot clearly be allocated for any particular reason.
We also have the Gungahlin Drive extension, which I am sure the opposition is going to keep talking about because it is so iconic of this government. It was a $53 million project, meant to be delivered in 2005. Years later, and $200 million later, the road is finally finished.
Mr Gentleman spoke about a few projects that the government has in the pipeline. He spoke of light rail, city to the lake, the Australia forum and the stadium. They all sound great; they all sound really good. The problem is that there is no money in the budget. In fact I do not think there is a single dollar in the budget for capital works for any of those four projects—light rail, city to the lake, Australia forum and the stadium.
Whether they can count some of these reports as notionally being capital spend as opposed to recurrent spend, who knows? The fact is that these projects are nowhere near shovel-ready and nowhere near having anything tangible put in place. The business case has not been made for any of them as yet. They all sound good; they have all got very good artist impressions. This government keeps the artist impression industry in business. They all have dozens of cafes with a million bikes parked out the front and it all looks very rosy. Unfortunately, it is a bit like the city plan which is not actually a plan: these projects never seem to get off the ground. No matter how many trips there are to New Zealand looking at stadiums, no matter how many study trips there are, no matter how many times they go on overseas trips to try and find something, unfortunately, the money just is not quite there.
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