Page 2601 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 11 August 2015
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Debate resumed.
Capital Metro Agency—schedule 1, part 1.5.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.08): I am pleased Mr Corbell has come back to his seat; I thought he was going to leave and miss the ongoing debate. That would be a shame because Mr Corbell has put the metaphorical cart before the horse. This government picked a transport route and then fitted the studies to it without knowing the full cost, without knowing the full impact and without informing the people of the ACT what capital metro would really cost them. It was great to hear him quoting Mrs Dunne this morning. Mrs Dunne’s document from 2008 was quite smart. The bit he forgot to read, of course, is where the Canberra Liberals said they will take it to the people. The Canberra Liberals would do the work, they would determine the costs and they would find out what the impact is. We said:
If the case stacks up we will take a fully costed proposal to the electorate prior to the next election in 2012 to let the Canberra public make a fully-informed choice on this very significant undertaking.
That is something Labor and the Greens have not done and will not do. If Labor and the Greens truly believed in their case, they would take it to the next election. They would let the Canberra public, as Mrs Dunne said, make a fully informed choice on this very significant undertaking. Mrs Dunne went on to say that the Canberra public should be fully informed on a range of factors, such as what light rail would cost. Remember, we did not have those costs. All they said before 2012 was, “We’ll spend $30 million.” That is all they said they would spend. Remember, it started at just over $600 million, it has gone to almost $800 million and we have now a document floating around that says $900 million. It will just go on. Mr Corbell’s record for delivering capital works includes the GDE, which was first mooted at $55 million and ended up at something like $200 million. This territory cannot afford another mistake of that magnitude from this minister who fails on almost every occasion on the delivery of capital works.
The Canberra Liberals policy went on to say that the Canberra public should be fully informed on a range of factors such as what light rail would cost, how much it would cut travel times and decongest roads and what the contribution would be to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We committed $8 million over four years to feasibility studies and forward design of a light rail system for Canberra. That is as it should be, not, “We’ve made a decision and we’ll get some facts to fit the case.”
It is interesting that we never had the debate about the future of transport in the territory. The father of modern transport economics was Mr John Meyer, who ended up being a professor at both Harvard and Yale. He wrote a book on the urban transportation problem which is still regarded somewhat as the text on this issue. What does Meyer say? I quote:
… buses are pretty much everywhere more cost-effective than urban trains.
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