Page 4613 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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It is interesting; I really wonder whether cabinet is in complete agreement on this issue. Because either you have five people in cabinet who all agree to this $432 million expenditure and they are all equally irresponsible, or we have one of the biggest rifts in cabinet that self-government has ever seen—a rift on $432 million of expenditure. Do we have five members opposite from two or three factions all in agreement on this huge expenditure?
Look at the other priorities in Canberra. Look at how they have squandered money and look at what that money could have been spent on. Look at the Gungahlin Drive extension promised in 2001 at a cost of $53 million. Here we are, 10 years on, and the road apparently just opened at a cost of over $200 million and about five, six or seven years too late. Look at what the alternative could have been. Had it been built at early 2000 prices, had it been built six or seven years ago, how many millions of hours of productivity would the ACT have gained? How much more money would the ACT have had to invest in other infrastructure projects or, better still, return to taxpayers?
When it comes down to it, I wonder whether that $1,250 per person—man, woman and child in the ACT—is best spent on a government office building which really is nothing more than a trophy for the ACT Labor government. It is all about self-indulgence. It is all about them having something that they can point to and say they have done. Well, that is where we differ on this side of the chamber. We actually want to empower individuals. We will measure our success when we get into government not by what we do but by what we enable individuals to do. We want to return the choice, return the freedom, return the ability to spend money to the individual. It should not be for those opposite, the greedy members of cabinet, to foolishly and flippantly decide that $432 million of taxpayers’ money is better spent on their grandiose schemes rather than returning it to individuals or properly investing it in infrastructure that this city so desperately needs.
We have already heard from Mr Seselja and Mr Smyth that not only does the whole project not stack up but nor does the actual process. When you do not have an output that stacks up and you do not have a process that stacks up, what is actually left? All that is left is an input of $430 million; $430 poorly invested. It is a very poor decision to spend $430 million in this way. In effect, a $430 million project was done on the back of an envelope in terms of the planning of it. The story changed. During the estimates process we saw that every day or two the premise of the argument was shifting, and it is still shifting. I wonder how it can be that a proposal is dreamed up, is put into a cabinet submission, goes through apparent cabinet scrutiny and then comes out as a budgeted item with so little scrutiny and with so little in the way of tangible documents giving credence to this level of expenditure.
Here at the Assembly, if you want to get something approved from your discretionary office allowance, that probably requires more of a business case than the government did for this $430 million office building. You can rest assured it would get more scrutiny as well. At least it is put up on the web—parliament.act.gov.au—and people can see it. That is more than happens over there. I would like to see the one page the government have put up on their website—act.gov.au—as their way of disclosing what they are doing.
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