Page 3485 - Week 09 - Thursday, 21 August 2008
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of this Assembly. These are promises on the record that have been costed by Treasury. They are the Treasury costings of Liberal Party promises to date. It makes absolutely fascinating reading. The net operating balance computed by Treasury, having taken into account the proposed additional expenditure, the policy announcements, the election commitments and the proposed loss in revenue, is a deficit in 2008-09 of $12 million, a deficit in 2009-10 of $147 million, a deficit in 2010-11 of $191 million, and a deficit in 2011-12 of $226 million.
That is the bottom line of the Liberal Party’s election commitments to date. And that does not take into account any infrastructure. They are just the recurrent hits without taking into account the massive infrastructure promises that they have made in relation to the GDE, the Tennent Dam et cetera. So this opposition cannot ever talk about infrastructure with any credibility in the face of the reckless promises they have made.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (4.43): I welcome the opportunity to discuss this important subject today, this MPI on planning and the delivery of infrastructure in the ACT. I thank Mr Stefaniak for having brought it on.
Let me immediately tackle the point made by the Chief Minister about the delivery of health infrastructure. Again we see the Chief Minister continuing to mislead the community about the Liberals’ advertisements on our new policy on GP clinics. Chief Minister, from the first minute to now the position has not changed. The position has been consistent. We will deliver GP clinics and there will be bulk-billing. I am proud to say it. That has not changed. The government position is the propagation of a continual lie. It is the sort of propaganda that we see the Chief Minister trotting out because he fears that policy. He knows that policy is going to fill a gap which has been created after years of mismanagement by his government.
Let me get back to the other infrastructure issues. The lack of vision displayed by this government is bad news for Canberra residents. We only need to take a two-minute stroll around town—which is still in a deplorable condition, by the way—to see a city without the necessary infrastructure to adequately support a growing population. It normally takes decades of bad planning to achieve the kinds of mediocre outcomes that we have today, yet Messrs Stanhope, Barr, Corbell and all have managed to implement their short-sighted policies and produce a bad result within a space of five years. That is a gold medal performance—only five years required to make a mess of the place.
Let us look at a number of these examples. The Gungahlin Drive extension, the GDE, is a case in point in their ongoing competition with state Labor colleagues in their respective bids to design the worst city in Australia. Another gold medal, passion fingers achievement. The GDE was always meant to be a four-lane road. In fact, by the government’s own admission in 2003, had they decided to build the entire four-lane road that year, the cost would have been $120 million in 2003, real dollar terms. That is—yes, that is right—the exact amount the half-sized road ended up costing the taxpayer. That is wonderful delivery of infrastructure!
This government cannot be trusted to invest in the future infrastructure of this city and devise and implement an appropriate planning strategy consistent with the needs of a
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