5 January 2011

GDE Collapse Response - Nothing wrong, but we're making some changes

| johnboy
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GDE report

Chief Minister Stanhope has announced the release of a report of a review of the awkwardly named “oversighting procedures” for capital works in the ACT.

This, of course, is in the wake of last year’s wildly popular Gungahlin Drive Bridge Collapse.

Mr Stanhope, while admitting no fault in his government, has some plans to stop this happening again:

The review found the ACT’s delivery processes were sound however there was scope for improvement in the monitoring of some temporary works in particular for critical activities.

Mr Stanhope said all recommendations from the review would be adopted and a number had already been implemented.

“Measures will be put in place to strengthen the monitoring and verification of the design and construction of falsework, such as falsework for bridge construction,” Mr Stanhope said.

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Francois Dillinger10:05 am 06 Jan 11

The question has to be how naive we Canberrans can really be.

When one reviews the stuff-ups and clearly terrible decisions made by this government (along with the Federal and other state govts), we are left with only two logical conclusions: either the government is incompetent or corrupt.

Sadly its gotten to the point where as citizens we’d probably overlook the occasional ‘tendering and contracting anomaly’ (aka, favouritism, cronyism, corruption or ‘the Hong Kong High-Five’) if we actually got decent results.

At this stage, we have the same clique of companies tendering and winning government work, needlessly fuelling a construction boom in the government sector that really isnt required, and achieving shocking value for money.

Shame shame shame.

The sad thing is that canberrans appear to be so driven by cause-de-jour political symbolism and support for fringe issues that it forgets bread-and-butter government administration. My guess is that John Stanhope’s brother in law probably works in the construction industry, but that only a scurrilous guess…

WonderfulWorld5:39 pm 05 Jan 11

…”There has been a truly catastrophic fuckup. Several people were injured, and it’s a miracle nobody was killed. Huge amounts of money have been wasted on the failed construction, and the subsequent cleanup. There will be substantial delays to the GDE enhancements. That crowd of wankers over there are at fault, and they will suffer the appropriate penalties for their incompetence in a variety of areas”.

Love it!

“I didn’t do it!”

Bart Simpson Jon Stanhope

This is, of course, absurd. But did anybody really expect anything different?

I’d like to live in a world where such reports read like this…”There has been a truly catastrophic fuckup. Several people were injured, and it’s a miracle nobody was killed. Huge amounts of money have been wasted on the failed construction, and the subsequent cleanup. There will be substantial delays to the GDE enhancements. That crowd of wankers over there are at fault, and they will suffer the appropriate penalties for their incompetence in a variety of areas”.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. Never has, and never will. Instead we get waffle like “Delivery processes are sound however there is scope for improvement of monitoring.” And when heads should be rolling, nothing happens.

Situation Normal.

Francois Dillinger10:03 am 05 Jan 11

Unbelivable. Is this a joke?

It appears that the only supported conclusion (albeit on a brief reading of the exec summary) is that bridges are supposed to collapse from time to time.

Just goes to show how low the standards are in this industry and for this government.

Why wasnt there a parliamentary (or other properly independent) enquiry? If someone had been unfortunate enough to have died, there would have been much more scrutiny.

Stanhope flukes it again…

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