Page 3126 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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This also relates to the way in which the HQ will operate. We have now got activities split over at least two locations. Given the original proposal was to centralise them for efficiencies, it has now been split. It is a debacle, this project. It is running in a way that is so typical of so many of Mr Corbell’s projects: we saw it in the prison, where, yes, it was delivered on time and on budget, except it was not the same project; it lost more than 70 beds, it lost a gym, it lost the chapel, it lost so many other things that would have made the prison work better. In Mr Corbell’s attempt to prove that he could manage a major project on time and on budget, he changed the specifications.
Again we see that here with another major project. It is now seven years since the fires of 2003—seven years. One of the recommendations of the McLeod Report was that, for the emergency services community to be able to be to do their job and for the people of Canberra to be protected to the level that they deserve, we should actually have a new emergency services headquarters. Yet here we are, seven years later, with the new fire season three months away, and we still do not have that headquarters. That is negligent, gross mismanagement and an indictment of the ability of this minister to deliver anything—any major project.
The next part that we then moved on to was when I asked him, “Can you deliver projects?” This is what he said:
Mr Corbell: Plenty of projects, Mr Smyth—
MR SMYTH: Plenty? … So you will take that on notice and detail these “plenty of projects”?
The list that came back was quite extraordinary. There are some interesting things there—removal of tanks and remediation and some asbestos removal. They are all important. I do not say that none of these are important but, when you are claiming that putting water saving shower heads on is a project that you have delivered on time and on budget, you are really scraping the bottom of the bucket. The personal protective equipment storage at all ACT Fire Brigade facilities sounds like a cupboard: Mr Corbell delivers cupboards on time and on budget. I think that will be his political epitaph.
It is unfortunate, because it is a very important area that we look at here. When you talk about the capital works project, it will be interesting to see whether or not Mr Corbell will ever bother to answer question 406, taken on notice 36 days ago—whether or not he will be able to give us a sum over and above that which the Auditor-General has already concluded has been spent.
There was the announcement of new capital works in the 2010 budget for emergency services, including a project that I have pushed long and hard for over a number of years: the new rural fire shed facility at Tidbinbilla. That is long overdue for the Tidbinbilla Rural Fire Service. They are the brigade that really are at the pointy end. They are closest to the corridor where the fires come down regularly. We all know the saga where Mr Corbell in March 2009 said that a new shed for Tidbinbilla “would be dealt with in the budget context”. Nothing happened in 2009, which was very disappointing, but so typical of this minister, and so I am certainly pleased, and I
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