Page 3181 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 August 2013
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However, it is pretty clear, based on the evidence that we have, that it became apparent that the price of the dam was not going to be $145 million. We now know that it is about $409 million, but it became apparent because we know that ACTEW wrote to the government, to the shareholders at the time, and said, “Hey, it ain’t going to be $145 million. It’s going to be a lot more. It’s going to be many, many tens of millions more. It’s an order of magnitude more that it’s going to cost.” But did that change anything? No, it did not. We know that the government was out there pushing a line.
What then happened was that the dam price went up inexplicably from $145 million to $363 million and it then went up again from $363 million to the current cost, which is in the order of $409 million.
I think that the community has every right to have somebody with the authority, with the resources, with the experience, to look at what has gone so badly wrong with that project. In the context of this government that is also in this budget pushing a light rail project which is going to cost $600 million, lessons need to be learned about the management of big projects.
When you look at this government’s record on these big projects, there was the jail—and I think we all understand in this place what went wrong there, or we know some of what went wrong there. There was the great, big government office building, which I think Ms Burch was calling the “government death star”—the $432 million project that then fell over. The dam went from $145 million to $409 million. There are some pretty serious lessons that need to be learned to make sure that the errors that have been made with the dam, with the announcement about prices that then tripled, do not occur with light rail. How is the community to know that, just as we saw with the dam tripling or just as we saw with the great, big government office building that fell over because it did not stack up, we are not going to have the same misadventure with light rail?
The community have a right to know whether their $409 million was spent prudently. When people in Canberra—in Tuggeranong, Belconnen, Weston Creek, Woden, wherever they are—are getting their utility bills, I think they have a right to know whether the bills that they are paying have been as a result of money spent prudently by this government. The reality is that this government are doing everything they can to avoid scrutiny on that project. And you know why, don’t you, Madam Speaker? It is because if the Auditor-General were to do an audit into the dam and into other aspects of ACTEW, it would demonstrate that the government, that the shareholders, have been abrogating their responsibilities. They have not been doing a good job as shareholders on behalf of the people to whom they have a responsibility, that being the taxpayers of the ACT.
We reiterate our call for a proper review of what has been going on. It is a little bit like Andrew Barr refusing to table his tax review, his modelling that he has done. In this place today he said he has done it; it is just that he is not going to release it and he will fight tooth and nail not to release it. It is a bit like that. They do not want to release that because they know that it is bad news for them. It is the same when they
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