While the ACT Government is well known for its willingness to test the credulity of the electorate, its' recent claim work on the new hospital will be under way in 2020 is going to be hard to top.
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The $500 million project, commonly referred to under the acronym "SPIRE", was announced on September 20, 2016, during the closing weeks of the last ACT election campaign.
SPIRE stands for "Surgical procedures, interventional radiology and emergency centre. It had been rolled out to trump an earlier promise made by the ACT Liberals on August 9, itself a recycling of a previous Labor commitment that had been deferred in 2013, to construct a new $395 million hospital building.
The ALP was originally dismissive of the Liberal pledge, describing it as spendthrift and unnecessary. That changed when Canberra's health establishment seized on the proposal with the then ACT AMA president, Professor Stephen Robson, welcoming it.
"There's a very rapidly closing window of opportunity," he said at the time. "The current facilities are only just holding and if you delay this sort of infrastructure any longer it may well mean the wheels will come off the cart and the hospital won't cope... The hospital is at breaking point."
Now, two years on from the announcement and after delays influenced by the cost of light rail and the Mr Fluffy remediation program that have already pushed the completion date back from 2022 to 2024, neither the Health Minister, Meegan Fitzharris, or anybody else in her department knows where the facility should go.
A partially redacted question time briefing note obtained under FOI by The Canberra Times indicates the confusion over the choice of site is due to the need for a helicopter landing site and an estimated 350 car parking spaces.
Really Minister? Helicopters have been ferrying patients to the hospital for decades and people have been driving their cars there for far longer than that. These are needs you would expect any well-run bureaucracy to have taken into account from day one.
The remarkable thing, given the political history of this farrago, is that Ms Fitzharris has the front to assure Canberrans, through a spokesperson, construction is still due to start by 2020.
How can this be given ACT Health doesn't apparently have a workable site for a half billion dollar project that has already been pushed back at least twice before? It is pretty obvious much, if not all, of the planning that has been carried out to date will either have to be scrapped or modified once a site is finally chosen.
The reference to 2020 is, of course, all about the next ACT Election which is due to be held on October 17 that year. It will be quite embarrassing, even for this administration, to go to the polls two years from now with such a major pledge from the 2016 election campaign left unfulfilled.
That promise, voters will recall, was cobbled together at the last minute in the wake of the Liberal pledge to do something Labor had been talking about for a long time but never actually delivered on.
This latest debacle is further proof of the need for a comprehensive inquiry into the ACT Health system this Government has worked so hard to avoid.
