Page 2336 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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This is a government without agenda. This is a government without a clear path forward for the ACT as a whole, and the problem for the ACT as a whole is that the ordinary folk suffer because of this government’s mismanagement. As Mr Coe pointed out with capital metro, somebody will ultimately pay. You only have to look at the debacle of PPPs in New South Wales under the former Labor government where those costs came back to the residents. They never achieved in some of their tunnel projects the estimates that were put forward. They were made up to ensure that projects went ahead, and it is the public that pays.
We see the same process on the Gold Coast where the numbers were fudged to get the project over the line, and ultimately the taxpayers of Queensland will carry that burden. Let us not have that happen here, because it all ends up affecting the cost of living of the ordinary Canberra resident.
Look at the way that this government approaches so many things. Even since the tabling of the budget there have been announcements of things that are not in the budget. You would have thought the budget might survive at least a month or two before the government started announcing new initiatives, but it did not even do that.
The fear that I have is that they have in their capital provision account $1.3 billion but they cannot or will not tell us how it will be spent. How can a group like the estimates committee actually do its job when the government will not allow it to do so? When you have $1.3 billion and this government will not tell us on what projects it will be spent—and indeed, in the response to the estimates report, will not deliver things like cost-benefit analyses or total, final costs of projects—what confidence can we have in the processes that this government goes about?
Of course we need to get the best deal for the territory. But the government must come up with a mechanism to involve the Assembly and allow groups like the estimates committee or the public accounts committee, but ideally this place, to have a say in the approval of these expenditures, instead of coming back and saying, “We have signed some contracts; you have all signed up to it whether you like it or not.” That is not how it should work. There should be much greater clarity, and there should be a much clearer vision about where the government is taking us with these projects, rather than the emotional attachment of Mr Corbell to his train set and Mr Barr, apparently, to his stadium. These projects keep cropping up. But we are not any clearer on the detail.
As Mr Hanson raised on the brand new government office building, at a time when vacancies in the commercial sector are pushing 15 per cent in this city—and the minister is trained with some qualification in economics—when you move the market or you disturb the market in such a way as to ruin an already unstable market, and, let us face it, pushing 15 per cent is a very high vacancy rate, surely the purpose of the government’s policies should be moving towards equilibrium so that the market operates and turns over in a reasonable way instead of distorting it by suddenly saying, “We are going to take the public servants out of every location that we can and find this magical location 10 minutes walk from the Assembly where we can put all the ACT public servants.”
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