Page 2284 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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household, or $1,600 a person, including children, and that is just for the infrastructure elements of it. But it does not include some elements. Again it is difficult, as Mr Coe just pointed out, trying to work out who is doing what and where the money is going. There are bodies of work being undertaken by TAMS, $20 million of the budget for TAMS, to do works on the Gungahlin to Civic corridor in preparation for light rail. So the full cost is yet to be identified.
We can look to international experience to understand where these budgets can blow out. On 31 May on BBC News, there was a piece about Edinburgh’s new tram service, and I quote:
In the decade since the first money was allocated to the project, the price has doubled, the network has halved, and it has taken twice as long to build as originally planned.
Now that sounds like just about everything that this government does, doesn’t it? It is an anticipation, I think, of where it is likely to go with Capital Metro, based on the performance of this government.
The Centre for International Economics prepared a report for the estimates committee, and they implied similar problems. They talked about the future cost risk:
A substantial amount of expenditure on the University of Canberra Public Hospital, Capital Metro and the Courts project has been provisioned …
That totals $1.3 billion. The report goes on:
No detail on total costs or cost rollout have been provided. It makes it difficult to make an assessment about the merits of investment, or the impact of such investments on the financial strength of the ACT Budget.
I think that that is a good point, that there is not much coming out of this government, and what has come out of this government has been debunked—debunked by not just Mr Coe but by the Productivity Commission, by Infrastructure Australia, and by transport experts everywhere. It is appropriate to commend Mr Coe for the work that he has been doing in the absence of any substantive useful data or business cases from the government on light rail. Mr Coe, with probably a hundredth of the resources that have been allocated to this project, has been able to provide an equivalent analysis, and in some cases he has provided better analysis than that which has been provided by the government.
The report goes on:
Overall ACT population growth is soft, and thus the justification for construction of the Capital Metro may rely on uncertain grounds.
And further:
The Capital Metro has not been placed on the Infrastructure Australia “National Priority List”, it may not present good value for money.
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