By Dan Woolcott – Chairman of The Board
The recent exchanges between Brisbane City Council and the Queensland Government felt a little bit like when Alice went through the looking glass into a world where everything is reversed, including logic and common sense. Actually, it was far more surreal than that, it became like being in an episode of Utopia, whereas an industry we couldn’t but help feel if we had become part of a mockumentary that highlighted everything that is chaotic, wasteful and nonsensical about the politicisation of major projects.
I am of course referring to Brisbane Metro.
It would beggar belief that such a fundamental change to relocate the proposed new metro station at the Cultural Centre to beneath the BCEC was not already known about for months; yet the Queensland Government or Brisbane City Council either deliberately or incompetently opted to ignore this cornerstone of the concept design – perhaps for some ill-conceived political ‘gain’, but to the considerable cost of not only the three project teams competing for the work, but the ratepayers and commuters of greater Brisbane, and ultimately, the Queensland taxpayer.
There should be firm confidence in the existence of a sound, recently discovered engineering reason why such a substantial and disruptive change to the conceptual design of the Brisbane Metro project was necessary to be unearthed just a few days post the closure of the intensely demanding and prescriptive Design and Construct submissions by three competing Contractor consortiums, encompassing numerous industry organisations, an extended supply chain, and many hours of extended effort by those involved. And that is before you calculate the cost to each bidder, of around $9 million.
But there isn’t. Instead, there is finger-pointing and grandstanding, whilst our industry shakes its collective head in disbelief.
The project – and Brisbane – now face months of delay and wasted millions of dollars to work through the chaos to find the fix. Brisbane City Council will have to decide, and quickly, how they will complete the tender assessment, and compensate those affected by the ill-timed change, together with salvaging the scuppered process with the Queensland Government and re-defining what the final scheme will actually look like. Council then faces the decision of how to value the change. Common sense would urge that the flawed procurement process has wasted enough and the completion of the design and construct offering needs to follow an open-book process with the winning team, based on the merits of their submissions made only recently on Friday, 21 June.
QMCA, whilst pleased with some of the take up of Industry’s advice and recommendations during the extensive market sounding process, has consistently pressed for a collaborative approach of this complex scheme, and with an early works approach, to de-risk the project and provide better risk understanding, allocation, and mitigation strategies to provide more robust cost and time certainty outcomes.
Surely now is the time to remove those who have frustrated the sensical approach to procure Brisbane Metro, get the planning and concept fixed and resolved through both State Government and Council, and link together the client team, contractor, designer, supply chain and stakeholders in collaboration that is best for project – and best for Brisbane.
Enough is enough – there is no place for political point-scoring in the arena of delivering long-overdue infrastructure needs – and given this State Government’s blinkered policy of asset stagnation despite the progress evidently being enjoyed to the south, neither Brisbane nor Queensland can afford it.
It is time for the credits to roll on this episode of Utopia and for all parties to get on with working with industry to deliver Brisbane Metro, a much-needed piece of infrastructure, and to remember that in political games, nobody wins; not the taxpayer, not industry and not the political powerbrokers who will have to explain the latest round of chaos to their constituents.
