Page 1867 - Week 06 - Thursday, 5 June 2014
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The biggest blowout of all, of course, is the Cotter Dam. Labor promised that this was going to go for about $140 million. They delivered it a quarter of a billion dollars over budget. Canberrans have to pay for that.
And that is all before light rail. From the self-proclaimed world’s best treasurer—he fights Wayne Swan for that mantra—comes the city’s biggest white elephant. It will be as much use as Sydney’s monorail, but not as attractive. He claims that it is going to be transformational. It will be. What it will do is transform every tree on Northbourne Avenue into a stump. He is going to transform that corridor to a traffic jam for years whilst it is being built. And it will transform the developer, who is the luckiest builder in the Southern Hemisphere, because Andrew Barr himself admitted that there is no cost at which he will not build it.
Kerry Packer once said that you only get one Alan Bond in a lifetime. Some rail developer somewhere will say that you only get one Andrew Barr. Put simply, $614 million, if you believe that figure, is the price that Labor put on securing Shane Rattenbury’s support to form government. It is a debt that Canberra families will be paying off for generations. We know it, the government knows it and the people of Canberra are beginning to know it too. The problem is that, like so many announcements this government has made, the government just cannot tell the truth.
The amount being allocated to this budget is not the $23 million headline figure touted by the government. In fact committed funding for capital metro is $64 million. That includes spending in 2013-14, forward estimates and money contained in the TAMS budget for the Civic to Gungahlin corridor improvements, which are specifically listed as preparation and support work for light rail—$8 million in 2014-15 and $12 million in 2015-16. And this is before any of the funds for the actual construction of the project itself.
Based on this government’s performance, Madam Speaker, I guarantee to you that this will not be built on time, this will not be built on budget and there will be no change left over from a billion dollars. Meanwhile, while Simon Corbell pushes his light rail full steam ahead, other important projects are being left at the station.
One example is the promised upgrade to the hospital tower at the Canberra Hospital. This was once a major infrastructure project lauded by the Chief Minister. Forty-one million dollars was put in the 2011-12 budget to get that project ready to go. But that was removed and now it is a vague intent for sometime in the future. Does anything show how off-track this government is, when they are putting the light rail, Simon’s train set, ahead of fixing what is one of the worst performing health systems in this country?
This budget is the culmination of a Frankenstein coalition, the result of what happens when a desperate, rabid Green will do anything, including crippling the family budgets of this city and abandoning core services, for a light rail system.
The double standards from this government have become all too common. I am amazed that only this morning members of this government had the hide to come into
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