Page 2210 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 August 2016
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creating jobs as we do this: 500 construction jobs alone on the light rail project. And it is all affordable. We are getting back to surplus in the same year we start paying for light rail.
Light rail has been in our budget since 2013 and we continue to retain a AAA credit rating. For example, for every $1 we spend on stage 1 of light rail we will spend $33 on health and $24 on education. It is one per cent of the ACT budget. We can afford light rail and a better public transport network now.
The ACT government has signed a contract with some of the world’s biggest infrastructure companies to deliver stage 1 of light rail. This was the government’s commitment, it is the government’s plan and we are delivering it. This is a contract that was negotiated in good faith and it brings high quality public infrastructure to the ACT. It should be honoured.
This, though, is not what Mr Coe wants to do. Mr Coe, as a potential treasurer of the ACT, wants to tear up this contract, which would cost Canberrans at least $300 million. Canberrans would get nothing but debt and the potential loss of our AAA credit rating in return. This is not a commitment to strong economic management.
Just last week Mr Coe actually told a policy forum he was going to try to rescope a light rail contract. He wants to tell the Canberra Metro consortium to build roads or bus lanes instead of light rail. The man who wants to be Treasurer wants Deutsche Bahn, the second largest transport company in the world and the largest railway operator in Europe, to build bus lanes. He wants to tell CAF, the Spanish railway manufacturer building our light rail vehicles, to stop that and build something else instead. And one of the first conversations he wishes to have as Treasurer is to tell the largest bank in Japan, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, to stop financing our light rail and to finance something else instead. That is not strong economic management. That is economic recklessness.
After all of these conversations, the Canberra Liberals say that Canberra will actually need light rail in 20 years time. Mr Coe indeed has said he would use the existing light rail plans because we would still own the plan for the rail and the design work. The Canberra Liberals would build light rail in 20 years time but they would use the plans drawn up in 2016 to do it, and they would pay four times as much. This is not strong economic management. This is, as a former Abbott government minister once said, economic lunacy.
Then there is the Canberra Liberals’ bus plan. It is an idea with attractive, colourful lines on a map of Canberra but it is not an integrated transport system, which is what our city needs, as was outlined by this government in 2011 and 2012 in the transport for Canberra policy plan.
Let us just remind the chamber of the Liberals’ track record on public transport. In 1998 Kate Carnell said that she would trial a test track for light rail. In 2005 the Canberra Liberals supported light rail. In 2008 they said it was not happening quickly enough. In 2009 the Canberra Liberals voted against rapid bus routes. In 2012 the
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