Page 3153 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
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We know it does not protect value for money for the taxpayer, we know it does not protect value for money for the community as a whole, and we are not going to disclose that figure. That figure is critical if we are to maintain a competitive process through the tendering exercise that we are proceeding with.
Indeed Mr Coe’s colleagues on the Select Committee on Estimates agreed with the government. In fact they went further. In recommendation 65 of the Select Committee on Estimates Mr Coe’s colleagues, and indeed the rest of the committee, in a unanimous recommendation, said that the government should table in the Assembly “after the preferred tenderer has been selected, the final cost-benefit analysis, the estimated total cost to the ACT, and the delivery model” for the project.
The government thinks that we can release some of that information earlier, and we have committed to do so, with the release of the full business case on 31 October this year. But Mr Coe seems to have blind ignorance of the position adopted by Mr Smyth and Mr Wall in the estimates committee, when they said, “No, we recognise that there are sensitivities with the release of some of this information that could compromise value for money for the community. We don’t think that information should be released until after you’ve selected your preferred tenderer.”
So Mr Coe is even at odds with his own colleagues on that side of the chamber. He is at odds with Mr Smyth and Mr Wall, who recommended that this should actually occur at the end of the competitive tendering process. But no; Mr Coe is here today saying, “No, that should happen before the tendering process.” So he is in direct conflict with the views of his colleagues that were put forward in the estimates committee report.
Finally, I will turn to the issue of patronage because Mr Coe also raised that in his comments this afternoon. It was disappointing to see the report in the Canberra Times today because it does not capture the full patronage estimation for Northbourne Avenue. In particular, the quoted figure in that report of 7,996 passengers a day along Northbourne Avenue was actually data only provided from one point along that route. That was patronage at the Macarthur Avenue stops. The consequence of only using that data means that that report has not captured all the journeys that originated north of Macarthur Avenue—that is everything particularly between Dickson and Gungahlin—and all the patronage originating south of Northbourne Avenue, city bound, south of Macarthur Avenue through the city. There is a lot of patronage, particularly coming out of Dickson, that was not accounted for in that figure and which was drawn to the attention of the Canberra Times, but regrettably that was not reported in the paper this morning.
It is very important that we have a like-for-like comparison. If you were to look at the patronage figures from Macarthur Avenue in 2021, Capital Metro’s estimate is that it would be 10,100—about 2,000 more than the current patronage. But that is, of course, in six years time, and that is a very reasonable and prudent estimate. If you look at patronage along the entire corridor, using all of the data available, not just one point along the route, which is the data referred to in the Canberra Times report this morning, you would see that the estimate that Capital Metro have is 13,700. That takes account, of course, of population growth along the corridor over the next six
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