Page 1222 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2016
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(3) calls on the Labor Government:
(a) not to sign any contracts and let Canberra’s people decide on light rail; and
(b) to reduce the cost burden on Canberra’s citizens.
This is a very important motion because we know that currently there are great impacts on the people of Canberra because of the decisions of this government. And we know that they will get worse. How do we know that they will get worse? We know that the government are going to foist on the people of Canberra the costs of paying for and maintaining their expensive light rail, a light rail option that serves less than five per cent of the people of Canberra but that all of the people of Canberra will get to pay for.
We know the cost now—approximately $700 million, if you can believe that cost. What we do not know, though, are some of the hidden costs that the government is already incurring on moving infrastructure and upgrading Northbourne Avenue. It will be interesting to see what the total cost of light rail up Northbourne Avenue to Gungahlin is.
What we do know, though, courtesy of Capital Metro, is that the costs of light rail over the life of the contract will be less than one per cent of government expenditure. Let us assume that the budget is at $5 billion, so one per cent of that would be $50 million a year, or less than one per cent would be $45 million a year. If you then work that down to the 150,000 households, that is about $300 more into the rates of the households every year.
To quote Donald Rumsfeld, there are some known unknowns, and the unknowns are the things that the government will not tell us. They will not tell us what the total construction cost will be. They are not telling us what the availability charge will be. Indeed, in a hearing the other day, we asked the Under Treasurer what the interest rate would be. He said, “The interest rate the government gets is about three per cent and the cost to the consortium will be much higher.” So we know that there will be a higher interest rate and we do not know, courtesy of the government, what the total repayments will be.
But we do know that rates are going up. We do know that rates have already gone up 50 per cent on average since this government’s reforms started. We know that they are set to triple over 11 years because the Treasurer at the time referred us to the documents, the Quinlan review, which said they must triple over 11 years. The only way that you can remove stamp duty and put it all into the rates is to see the rates triple.
We know that fees, fines and charges are going up, because this government have not diversified the ACT economy and have not diversified the tax base to ensure that they can lessen the fees, fines and charges they foist on the people of the ACT to fund their current deficit. They have not even managed a surplus. This Treasurer is looking more and more like Wayne Swan. He has his mining tax equivalent—the lease variation
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