Page 3478 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 August 2008
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$100 million or more to fix up a mess that should never have happened to start with. The government has panicked in realising what a horrible blue it had caused, which was painfully obvious. It has tried, rather pathetically, to gazump an opposition announcement, and everyone saw through what the government was doing in that regard. That road has become one of the collar weights for the Chief Minister as he stands on the blocks for the election race.
There are another couple of interesting examples. There is, of course, the arboretum. I understand that it started at a cost of $10 million and went to $12 million. Then, of course, in the horror budget, as a result of the Costello report of 2006-07, the Chief Minister scaled it back to a cost of some $6 million. However, at the time, the ACT was in the grip of the worst and longest drought on record, and we are still in a drought. The people of Canberra were wondering how this arboretum was going to be watered when they were on level 4 water restrictions.
Another example is the prison. The prison, at a cost of $131 million, is, I am told, the second most expensive prison in the country. It has certainly been scaled down in size and scope, but not in dollars. No matter which way you look at it, whether it is in pure dollar terms or in terms of the scale and scope being delivered for the dollars allocated, the prison is yet another example of the Stanhope Labor government’s abject incompetence when it comes to managing large-scale capital projects.
Housing infrastructure is another failure of this government. For years, it has been stashing land and only releasing it when it can get the best economic gain for its sale. It is one of the reasons for our housing crisis in Canberra in terms of both housing stock and housing affordability. The government’s addiction to maximising its proceeds from land sales has meant that it has arrogantly disregarded Canberra’s young people, who are despairing at their inability to achieve the great Australian dream of owning their own home. It is painfully obvious that we hoarded land at a time when there was a great demand for land in Canberra. People simply could not get it. We saw rents increase, and people had great difficulty in renting. Now, with the slowdown in the economy—in fact, with the bottom falling out of it, thanks to Mr Rudd and Co, amongst other things—we finally have the Chief Minister agreeing to release quite a significant amount of land. It is a little bit late. If he had done that two or three years ago, it may well have worked.
Of course, it just goes from the sublime to the ridiculous. Another project is the doozy of them all—the gas-fired power station and data centre. There was no consultation. People suddenly found—and this should have been blindingly obvious to anyone—that there was going to be a power station about 600 metres from a residential area in Macarthur. The government has a very short memory, because there was talk—it might have even been a furphy—of having, God forbid, a dragway at Macarthur back in 2004. That certainly got the good burghers of Macarthur up and running in a big way. The minister at the time—it might even have been Mr Hargreaves—at least had the sense to can that idea. But that should have been a little bit of a precursor to the government about actually consulting with people and talking to them if you are going to do something fairly substantial nearby. Within the space of four years, the people of Macarthur suddenly realised that there was going to be this whopping big power station about 600 metres from a residential area.
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