Page 2286 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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It is disgraceful, Madam Speaker. They are trying to ask us in this place to trust them when it comes to light rail. One of the problems that the government have is that they are out there in the community, saying, “$614 million; trust us,” and not one person in Canberra trusts this government to deliver this project anywhere near the budget they are proposing or on time.
The Productivity Commission conducted an inquiry into this project, No 71, on 27 May 2014. Let me quote what the Productivity Commission said. It is a pretty conservative organisation. This is not an organisation that is wont to put out provocative statements. It said:
The ACT Government’s decision to proceed with a light rail project appears to be an example of where the results of cost-benefit analysis have been ignored without valid explanation.
Shame. It went on:
In summary, a cost-benefit analysis showed Bus Rapid Transit to be a greatly superior option than Light Rail.
That is the Productivity Commission—that is not Mr Coe—just on the infrastructure costs. We then have to look at what the operational costs will be. The point is that we do not know. We do not know what the operational costs will be. So although we are being asked to take this great leap of faith on capital metro, the minister himself—and this is in response to a question on 14 February—has said:
The operational arrangements and parameters for Capital Metro are being defined; therefore it would be premature, at this stage of the project, to provide an operational cost estimate.
That is Minister Corbell’s Sir Humphrey answer for “I’ve got no clue; I don’t know what it is; I can’t tell you.” But what I can tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, is that, whatever the government does come back to this place with an estimate for, you can probably double it. That is the experience. That is the evidence when you go back through their projects—the jail, the GDE, the dam and so on.
They are already spending a lot of money. There is a lot of money in this budget—$43,000 a week or $2.34 million a year—for staff wages. That includes a $382,000 annual salary for the project director of capital metro; $184,000 to a comms director. The spin coming out of capital metro is pretty extraordinary. If anyone is on Twitter and follows capital metro and looks at the lovely YouTube videos that they are producing, all the information and marketing that they are doing, they are spinning capital metro hard before this government says that they have actually made a final decision to do it. Some $184,000 for one employee to spin capital metro.
I do not know what other staff that individual has got and what other resources as well. But all up, that staff resource is $12.3 million over the next four years. Extraordinary. So it is reckless, Madam Deputy Speaker, for the government to be talking about spending $640 million on a project when they cannot even tell us how much this is going to cost to run. (Second speaking period taken.)
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