Page 1359 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 13 May 2014
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saying yes, they were in favour of it and then he was recorded in a north residents meeting saying that they would do everything they could in their power to stop it.
It is important to get to the bottom of the capital metro. I am sure my colleague Mr Coe will continue to do the good work that he is doing to ensure that we do. This project, which nominally has a price tag of about $600 million—although I am now hearing numbers of up to a billion dollars for the cost of just this first stage—will drain the capital works budget for a very, very long time and potentially at the same time expose future governments to payments to make the operation of the capital metro work.
We need to look at the approp bill, and you need to question, Madam Speaker, a couple of weeks out from the ACT budget and a couple of months out from the end of the financial year: is all of this funding appropriate, is it necessary and can it actually be spent by the end of the financial year? For instance, we had another embarrassing gaffe from Minister Burch when she was asked would the money be spent by the end of the year. She said, “Yes, it will all be spent by the end of the year.” Then we had the lesson from the financial officers in the department of education about how the money was required to be appropriated so that the new school could go out to tender, that some hundreds and thousands might be spent but the full $7 million would probably not. Minister Barr the next day very kindly reiterated some of that information to us as Treasurer and confirmed the process by which money is appropriated so that tenders and contracts can be let. He might have that discussion with Minister Burch because she clearly does not know how that works.
We also find in the documents, if members have not read them, that there are a significant number of rollovers occurring. Again, there is project after project where there are rollovers. Some have reasonable excuses in that it was a matter of timing and they were expected to be paid early in the new financial year. Some of them clearly are just a failure of this government to get their planning processes right.
On page 50 of the supplementary budget papers we have got the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander residential, alcohol and other drug rehabilitation facility. This was meant to be open by now. This is another failed health project where the health minister has not consulted properly, where the health minister has not been able to bring the community with her and where the health minister now sees a blowout so that this project now will not be completed until 2016-17, and we see $4 million being pushed out to the 2015-16 and 2016-17 financial years.
Money has been spent on this project to clean up the site. You have to question the due diligence in purchasing a site that needed significant rehabilitation, and apparently that is what has occurred. You also have to question how the consultation was conducted in that the process went to ACAT. The government has had the win eventually, but in the interim all those people in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community have not had a residential facility because, again, the government did not listen initially to the community. They did not want this site. They certainly accepted it in the end because it was the only site that the government had on offer, but it is not where they want it to be. That is the problem when you have got a
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