Page 4210 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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delivered for me and the people of Canberra?” When people ask themselves those questions they might think about a plastic bag ban or a ban of fireworks. The alliance have certainly been good at banning some stuff, but they have not been very strong on delivering.
Public transport is an area where the people of the ACT would have expected that the Labor-Greens alliance would deliver something. The Greens certainly talk the talk about public transport. They certainly talk about it, but I think they are realising that they are going to be now held to account for the fact that over the last three years they have achieved very little, if anything, when it comes to public transport.
That brings us of course to the question of light rail. I will get into the details of the motion shortly but we do need to look at the Labor Party’s record on this. It is probably no surprise that Ms Bresnan, I think rightly, complains about the lack of action, although I do ask the question again about the Greens: where have they been for the last three years? Why have they not been enforcing action on this issue? But we should not be surprised that there has not been action—because we have seen this before. How do I know that? I only have to go back to 2001. Jon Stanhope in 2001, 10 years ago, said, “We will conduct a feasibility study into light rail and conduct public consultation on the findings.” So just before the 2001 election Labor promised light rail. Not to be outdone, Jon Stanhope came back in 2008, just before the ACT election, funnily enough, and said:
I am extremely pleased to be able to announce that the ACT government is moving ahead with its exploration of light rail …
Seven years later, nothing had been done. And then of course in the lead-up to the 2012 election we are going to get the government saying, “We would like to do something on light rail.”
There is a pattern emerging here, and it is one thing maybe to be fooled once or to be fooled twice, but to be fooled three times by these Labor Party promises I think is beyond the pale, and I do not think there would be many people in the community who will believe anything that the Labor Party say on light rail in the lead-up to the 2012 election. They have not taken action in this area, and I think that is unfortunate. I think that is a missed opportunity.
Let us look at what they claim to have done or what they have been doing. There was a $200,000 PWC report commissioned by the ACT government and it found that a 54-kilometre network that would extend to Belconnen, Tuggeranong, Gungahlin, Kingston, Manuka and Civic would cost approximately $2 billion. The report found that the project had a cost-benefit ratio of 1.62 and indicated that the environmental and congestion relief benefits may not justify the cost of light rail. The report formed part of the ACT government’s unsuccessful bid to Infrastructure Australia.
Let us just think for a moment about spending $200,000 on a report into light rail, which would be a $2 billion project. This minister, Minister Corbell, threw away $5 million on a study for one busway. Granted, that was a shocking example of wasting taxpayers’ money on a project that was never going to go ahead. But, if the
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