Page 1407 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 13 May 2014
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whole program to expand the hospital. Some firms thought they had contracts to help design the next stage of the hospital and that was all changed and taken in-house.
If we are going to be truthful about this, it is not pretty, it has not been well done and it has cost the territory more than it should have. Whether or not it has transformed the ACT is yet to be decided, I would expect. It does not have to be just built form either. There are capital works in the form of the real-time passenger information service, which I think has now been coming possibly for nine years. It has been on the books for a long time and we are yet to see it. So let us not be too quick to leap to the “transformational” word.
The best summary of this government’s approach to infrastructure was when it released its infrastructure plan. It could not even spell it right: “infastructure”. That is what it is. It is a stutter that this government has. It stumbles over when it comes to infrastructure in most cases.
It is also important, of course, that the federal government plays a role in the infrastructure of the ACT. Tonight we will hear another budget. I think we all know that there is some grim news coming because of federal Labor’s inability to balance the budget or to deliver their infrastructure or capital work programs on time as well.
If, as reported, 16,000 jobs go tonight, 14,500 of those jobs, or 91 per cent, are an outcome of federal Labor’s mismanagement of the national economy. That is to their shame and it is to the shame of those opposite who never once stood up to their federal colleagues—unlike those on this side who have said to our federal colleagues on numerous occasions, “We don’t accept your premise and we don’t accept what you’re doing.”
Depending on what happens tonight, it will be interesting to see how the capital emerges. The last Liberal government, after a rough period to start with, understood the value of the capital and put enormous capital investment into the ACT, unlike the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government, the merry-go-round government, where everybody got to be prime minister depending on what day it was. They cannot claim to have been as good to the ACT as the Howard years were.
In the Howard years we got the road infrastructure—the Barton Highway upgrade and the Federal Highway upgrade. We got airport infrastructure, where they assisted with the lengthening of the runway. We got cultural infrastructure, whether it was through the building of the National Museum of Australia or the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, whether it was extensions to the National Gallery of Australia or the Australian War Memorial or whether it was refurbs to places like the Mint or the National Capital Exhibition at Regatta Point. We got things like the upgrade to Anzac Parade, perhaps the most significant street in this country. The redevelopment of Russell Hill went ahead. Whether it was the various memorials that they built—things like the emergency services memorial and the Australian of the year walk—or whether it was the business and development infrastructure that they built through funding things like NICTA and Epicorp, all of them have a huge impact and help this territory and this economy to get ahead.
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