Page 3067 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 August 2008
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will be funded over the next four years. The rabble opposite often go on about the final cost compared with their budgeted $32 million for a short section.
I do not know how much it would cost to build a tunnel, but they were going to include two major tunnels in that $32 million. How? Again, let us get real for a moment. The bridge construction at Belconnen Way will be a major project in itself and will cost in the order of $7 million. I think it was $7.1 million or $7.3 million—I have forgotten which of the two—for the one across Belconnen Way at the moment.
There are nine major bridges to be built and I do not think tunnels are cheaper; so how far would their $32 million go? In fact, I remember sitting on a committee asking them whether their $32 million was enough. However that may be, the initial work will take place this year and will provide a second southbound lane at Caswell Drive from Aranda to the Glenloch interchange. And you can now get from Gungahlin to Caswell Drive, which you could not under their particular proposals. This work will commence in the next two weeks and will provide some benefits to the public in time for Christmas. The balance of the GDE duplication will take place over the next three years.
The duplication of the GDE from the Barton Highway to the Glenloch interchange includes the construction of nine major bridges and a number of underpasses. The preliminary design is available for the GDE duplication and this has now been progressed to final design prior to tenders being called for the construction works by June 2009.
The duplication of the GDE will be completed and open to the public by June 2001—not 2014; 2011. And do you know what else? People will be driving on Gungahlin Drive and on Caswell Drive while the duplication is going on. How about that? Where are the congratulations for that? I do not know. All in all, the GDE will have cost more than $200 million. This is a major investment by a small jurisdiction such as the ACT. But the government considered that it is essential to support and build the economy into the future.
To understand why it has been duplicated now rather than at the start, it is important to roll the clock back a few years. I have already explained how the Liberal Party regarded the GDE as being between the Barton Highway and Belconnen Way, which is where it should stop. In October 2001, the ACT community elected a Labor government and we sought to progress the preferred community route for the project to the west of the Australian Institute of Sport. The Liberal opposition and the federal Liberal government at the time throttled our every effort to progress this route. Through the guise of the National Capital Authority, the ACT government were reluctantly forced to accept the route to the east of the AIS in 2002.
This decision of the Liberal opposition and the federal Liberal government cost the ACT community over $20 million in terms of legal challenges and two years in lost time while people who were rightly concerned about the impact of the road in Bruce and O’Connor Ridge expressed their democratic rights through the court system. This $20 million is a cost that persons of Liberal persuasion should never forget.
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