Fred Nile's Committee Update on Cross City Tunnel
Chairman of the Joint Select Committee on the Cross-City Tunnel, the Reverend Fred Nile MLC gave the following address to the NSW Legislative Council on the Committee’s recent report;
“I move that the House take note of the report.
As members know, the cross-city tunnel inquiry included also a reference to public-private partnerships. This report deals mainly with that aspect. As some progress had been made with the cross-city tunnel and as the Government had adopted some recommendations with regard to it, the committee reviewed matters that were applicable to the cross-city tunnel itself.
The second report examined the role of New South Wales government agencies in public-private partnerships more generally and expanded upon the recommendations made in the first report. We examined cross-city tunnel developments since the committee's first report, which have gone some way towards addressing the concerns identified. A number of further recommendations responding to these developments have been made”, Rev Fred Nile said.
The committee found that public-private partnerships fill a small but significant niche in the provision of public infrastructure in New South Wales, with between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of the State's capital program being delivered through such arrangements. It is crucial that the Government addresses public mistrust of private involvement in the provision of public infrastructure and services. To that end, focus of the recommendations in this report has been on improving the transparency of public-private partnership arrangements. We recommended that documents such as the public sector comparator and the base case financial monitor be publicly available. We put the onus on the Government to make these complex contractual relationships and the rationale for entering into them easily accessible and understood by the community they are intended to serve.
The committee's work is continuing with the expansion of the terms of reference to include the Lane Cove project currently under construction. The committee will report on its finding in relation to the Lane Cove tunnel in September 2006. It has advertised for submissions and has already prepared a list of witnesses to be heard on 14, 15 and 16 June—three days of sitting. I would like to thank members of the committee for their continuing efforts during the second part of inquiry. I thank, in particular, the committee secretariat, Laura Milkins, Natasha O'Connor, Annie Marshall, Stephen Frappell, Victoria Pymm and Simon Johnston, and Stewart Smith of the Parliamentary Library Research Service, for their hard work. I take this opportunity to also thank the former committee director, Rachel Simpson, who has moved on to the Attorney General's Department, for her work on this and previous committee inquiries,” said Rev Fred Nile MLC.