Page 1817 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2011
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function efficiently. It is also critical that the delivery of these roads is managed effectively. The management of the project to duplicate Gungahlin Drive and the upgrade of the Glenloch Interchange really does raise serious questions about the capacity of the Labor government to undertake these types of projects.
Mr Hanson rightly points out that the government has not delivered any major project on time or on budget in the last decade. It is an absolute disgrace that Gungahlin Drive had to be duplicated as a result of this government’s appalling decision to build it as a single-lane major arterial road when it had been advised by its officials that before it was finished it would be at capacity. Who builds a road that has already reached its capacity before it is finished? Jon Stanhope and his government do. It is also amazing that the work to duplicate Gungahlin Drive and to upgrade the Glenloch Interchange has been undertaken as a series of separate contracts rather than a single contract. In some ways, the management of these projects really does warrant an evaluation by the Auditor-General at least.
In the case of Gungahlin Drive, some of the bridges required for duplication have been completed for many months, yet the roadworks to connect these bridges are only now being undertaken. The project to duplicate the connecting roadwork is proceeding at a very rapid pace, and that would appear to be to the credit of the contractor involved. Of course, we have had the issue of the collapse of the bridge over the Barton Highway that caused some delay to the overall project. But even that now appears to be nearing completion.
As an overall project, the issue of separate contracts for different pieces of work has resulted in inefficiencies and delays, such that virtually the entire length of Gungahlin Drive is currently limited to 60 kilometres per hour. This has been the case for many weeks and it is causing considerable frustration before you get the fiasco that we heard of this morning where the southbound lanes of Gungahlin Drive have been closed because of the roadworks and the breakdown of the machinery.
What chaos and inconvenience this is causing to people not just in Gungahlin but across the city, whether in Belconnen, central Canberra or stations further south. It causes inconvenience, and how unnecessary if a proper, standard two-lane arterial road had been built in the first place. The only place to look for blame for this fiasco is with the government. This Labor government had no idea what it was doing when it approved Gungahlin Drive as a single-lane road.
The Chief Minister made much this morning of what he assumed was the practice of the former Liberal government when he said that we always built one lane and then we came back and we did it. I am not sure that is true. He then claimed that, indeed, this was the way that the NCDC did it. Again, that is not true. I have actually spoken to somebody who was in the first ACT Legislative Assembly. I was told that they had discussions in the 1970s with the NCDC about the size of Parkes Way when Parkes Way was being built. If you were here before Parkes Way, you used to travel around the lake, the northern perimeter of the lake, just on Lady Denman Drive. I was told that they said they were going to build a single-lane road, with the tunnel through Acton—the cut-and-cover, which has proved effective there and would have proved just as effective on the route that we had chosen—but they argued that that was not
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