Page 3001 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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Mr Hargreaves: You were not there.
MRS DUNNE: I was in the chamber when Mr Hargreaves said the words, “We were not going to consult you because we knew what you were going to say.” The government simply closed the Griffith library because it did not want to consult, it was not open, it was not honest with the people and there was no accountability.
The GDE is another example of this government’s failure to deliver on its contract to the people of the ACT. We have ended up with half a road at twice the cost and it was not finished on time. But the government cried that it was finished on time and on budget, but it was only done in its reality, not in the reality of the people of Gungahlin and Belconnen who are still suffering every day with the backlog and traffic jams as a result of this government’s failure to plan.
Then after weeks and weeks and months of saying, “No, we do not need to duplicate it for another 10 years,” we had the bizarre announcement that the government would duplicate the road as an election commitment. That announcement was made at 6 o’clock in the afternoon because the government had been tipped off that the Liberals would make a similar announcement the next morning.
There was no costing for this announcement. There was no study. It was a backflip, a knee-jerk reaction. There was no costing from the government, there was no study from the government and there was no timetable for this, which was put together well after the fact. We had an undertaking from the government that it will duplicate the road in four years at a cost of some $90 million. So we will end up with the road we should have had from the very beginning but it will be 12 years after the previous Liberal government committed to building the road, 12 years after it was announced. Its costing will be something more than $200 million instead of something like $60 million that it would have cost if it had been done on time and done properly, as was committed to by this Stanhope government. Again, there is no openness, there is no honesty and there is no accountability.
Who could forget the gas-fired power station and the data centre, a huge project, planned to be built on the back doorsteps of residents in Macarthur? One day they were travelling along nicely, minding their own business, and the next morning the population of Canberra, in particular the residents of Macarthur, choked on their weeties when they read in the Canberra Times about a project that would have a profound impact on the enjoyment of their local amenity. There was no EIS to be undertaken; there was to be no community consultation. All the deals were done in secret, behind closed doors, and probably under the same blanket in the dead of night, using the same torch.
The extent to which there was secrecy and lack of openness was exemplified when the Leader of the Opposition conducted a press conference and laid out a sample of the documents that were provided under freedom of information in relation to the gas-fired power station. There was page after page after page of blacked-out information that showed the extent to which this government would avoid scrutiny, would avoid openness, would avoid accountability and would avoid being honest with the people of the ACT.
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