Page 2920 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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large investment for the territory. I am afraid the fact has not escaped me as to just how much of a new light-rail system we could build with this $430 million. So I think more feasibility studies need to be done.
On the subject of the amount of money, I have just come back from a Weston Creek Community Council meeting and there were people saying, “How come you’re spending $430 million on accommodating you?” I had to point out I was not part of the government. But I guess the point I am making is that there is a lot of community concern about this potential investment and I think we need to do a lot more work to work out that it actually is a good use of what is ultimately the money of the people of the ACT.
I do commend the high priority the government is putting on sustainability. I do agree that improvement in government office accommodation is an important step that the government will take to achieve carbon neutrality, which is its goal, by 2020.
Retrofitting options is the area where I think the government need to do a lot more work. There are a lot of existing buildings in Civic and quite a lot of them are either empty now or can reasonably be expected to become empty in the next six years, which is the time frame for this building to be built. And it has been really disappointing to see the government have immediately come to the conclusion that they have to build a new building. I have been asking the former Chief Minister about this for years through estimates, annual report hearings and questions without notice, and he has been very clear that there is nothing he would consider apart from a new building that the government built themselves.
It is possible that that is the best option. I am not ruling it out, but it is not possible to know it is the best option with the amount of analysis that the government have done. I do believe the former Chief Minister when he said they simply had not looked at it.
I do note that the Greens and the other members who are on the estimates committee have seen a small amount of analysis of one building, the Finlay Crisp offices. Given the former Chief Minister’s clear statements and the dates on this, one does get the feeling that this analysis has just been cobbled together because we have been saying, “You need to look at it.” So the government said: “Okay, we will spend a couple of thousand dollars. We will look at it.” But I have got no impression that the government have seriously looked at this with the intention of seeing whether it is a real possibility. They have looked at it with the intention of crossing it off so that the Greens cannot continue to talk about it. But we are going to continue to talk about it because it is a real issue.
The other issue they do not seem to have looked at is co-location. They have really said it is all or nothing. I think it is not as simple as that—not with a public service of the size that they are talking about, not with an office building of the size that they are talking about. Co-location has some serious advantages but so does simply putting people closer together. They do not all have to be in one building.
Looking at it with more vision, if we actually put light rail down Northbourne Avenue, then those buildings along Northbourne would become a lot more accessible. In
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