Page 2179 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 22 June 2010
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think she has hit the nail right on the head. It is not an infrastructure plan. The Business Council says that there is not much of a plan; it is a statement about ACT government capital works. Chris Faulks said that a fully integrated document needs to address infrastructure issues like public transport and water security. Hear, hear! There is nothing in this plan that does that. The council welcomed the inclusion of land release targets and population forecasts.
Ms Faulks said she was concerned that the document may not meet federal government funding requirements for state and territory infrastructure plans. That is a pretty significant deficiency. We have seen the difficulty for the ACT government in putting a decent case to the commonwealth to get infrastructure funded by the commonwealth. They do not even pay for what they said they would pay for—what they committed to paying for in the previous government—let alone fund new infrastructure priorities such as the Majura parkway. Ms Faulks’s criticism that she was concerned the document may not meet federal government funding requirements is a real concern. It is not the opposition saying that; it is the head of the Canberra Business Council here in the ACT. She is saying that it is not up to scratch. It is not up to scratch and it may even mean that we miss out again, that we as a territory miss out because this government has not done the work.
The Greens planning spokeswoman, Caroline Le Couteur, describes the plan as mimicking the recent budget, only with pictures—not a plan for the future, just a list of the things the government has got together. I say again to Ms Le Couteur that she has probably got the line of the day—the budget with pictures. We will acknowledge that that is a pretty reasonable description of what this plan is. It does not provide the vision that is needed; it does not provide even some basic substance. It is a shoddy piece of work from a lazy and tired government that simply could not be bothered.
This was another thing for the Chief Minister to tick off on. We heard it in estimates; we have been hearing it for a long time—“It is coming.” Eventually they put something out. They ticked the box, but they did not do the work. They did not bother to do the work. They just brought together a bunch of documents. They did not consult with the industry. Instead, they did it as an in-house document. And we see it. We see it right through.
It is worth highlighting a couple of areas. When we developed our infrastructure policies, we talked about the comprehensive nature of them. One of the things that I focused on, and one of the reasons we have advocated for a commissioner and a long-term plan, was to take out some of the obsession with individual projects. Individual projects are important, but unfortunately what happens is that basic issues that are not as popular or are not as sexy do not get addressed.
Eventually you have to address them. Maintenance is one of those issues; maintenance is one of those very important issues. And it is brushed over. “Maintaining the territory’s infrastructure” has a few paragraphs. The first paragraph tells us that we have got a lot of infrastructure in the territory. It goes on. It says:
Protecting this investment … remains a priority.
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