Page 2295 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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the point by the community demanding one. The government just rolled over and allowed the proponents to call the shots on this.
As for the question that Mr Corbell raised about one of the sites that Mr Smyth referred to at Hume, Mr Smyth has not said that that is our preferred site. He was simply talking about a site that would certainly be superior to the site in Macarthur. Mr Corbell, you are not right—the site in Hume is not as close to suburbs as is the Macarthur site. The site that Mr Smyth was referring to, which is just a hypothetical identification and certainly not a preferred site, is close to two kilometres from Gilmore. It is a damn sight further away than what the other site is from Macarthur.
The last point that I make now is that Mr Corbell crowed about what he mythically puts forward as being the attitude of business to the opposition. I will tell you what the business community think, and I will tell you what people who are part of the family that makes up the proponents think: they reckon you guys led them up the garden path. You sold them a pup. You gave them an untenable site. You gave them a piece of land which was untenable. You gave the proponents a land site which was clearly untenable. If it was not untenable, Mr Corbell, why the hell did you have to scale it down? If it was not untenable, if your magnificent decision, ex-planning minister, was so wonderful, why did you have to scale it down? Because you stuffed it. You made a stupid decision where you loaded upon the proponents an untenable site, which created the God almighty, mother of all responses from the community. You want to know what the business community thinks about that? They reckon you cannot be trusted.
The business community really think that the government led the proponents up the garden path, that the proponents were placed in an untenable position which caused an incredible response from the community and which has now made this matter commercially, politically, socially and environmentally untenable. That is why the Chief Minister had to come riding out of the sunset, instead of riding into it, to rescue this venture by saying, “Oh, we’ll scale it down from a 210 megawatt peaking station to supposedly 28 only for the reserve.”
By the way, I’ve got a question for you: if the original policy was a maximum total of 210 megawatts, with 28 megawatts allocated to the data centre and the balance to the peaking station, where were the other 300 megawatts going? Come on, you mob of transparent governors. Where were the other 300 megawatts going to? I am talking about the 300 megawatts that have now been added to the 200 to make up a 500 megawatt project to go down to Williamsdale? Are the residents of northern Tuggeranong correct when they say that the whole thing in the first place was a damned Trojan horse? That is why the community will not trust this government in relation to this current series of projects.
The business community thinks very, very lowly of you, Mr Stanhope, and your colleagues because a very valuable asset, a project which should be so important to assisting the diversification of the ACT economy, has been stuffed by you. Nobody over there had the brains to have a closer look at a $2 billion project. It got about the same treatment as the construction of a medium-size building somewhere. That is what the business community thinks about the government. Given the opportunity to
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