Budget brings believers back to earth with a bump
A pre-election promise of $8.0m to Fix Ferry Road almost seemed too good to be true – especially when it was echoed by both major parties. Well it looks like perhaps it was too good to be true as far as Labor are concerned. There is no specific allocation for Ferry Road in the State budget announced by the Treasurer today.
There is some money in the budget for Ferry Road in 2010/2011 but nothing committed in the out-years of the forward estimates. Buried under the heading Road Planning Allocation within the Department of Industry, Energy and Resources portfolio is an amount of $1.5 million.
Sounds promising you might think but then you notice in the fine print that “Commencing in 2010-11, this initiative provides funding of $1.5 million per annum for four years to accelerate planning work for future road projects, including as a priority, planning work for the Government’s Community Roads Package”.
The Community Roads Package includes 16 “priority” projects of which Ferry Road is but one. If they are all equal priority then that means a tad less than $100,000 each. Roughly equivalent to what DIER are spending annually to pump out the sewerage tank at the Bruny Island ferry terminal and probably about as useful in terms of actually getting something done. How many consultants can you buy for $100,000 these days?
It’s now over a year since Kingborough Council and DIER commenced development of a Precinct Plan for Ferry Road. Despite this plan being finalised last year there has been no feedback whatsoever from DIER on what they actually plan to do about implementing its recommendations. All we ever get, apart from impressive sounding election promises, is that there is a substantial amount of planning to be done before work can commence. That was certainly the line that we got from Graeme Sturges and now it looks like Lara Giddings and Michael Aird are singing from the same song sheet Sturgo used. If only someone from DIER would actually contact the community to at least provide us with a progress report or put us out of our misery.
