Lucy Wicks is at it again (Parliament hears about benefits of ATO building, CCN, Feb 11). This time with subtle differences to adjust the original rhetoric of the ATO scheme.
The original claim of creating 600 new jobs has now elided into “deliver(ing) 600 new jobs into the Gosford CBD,” craftily not mentioning that these are not local jobs and will have no impact on the employment figures for the Central Coast. They merely represent a shift of workers from one location to another, with no mention of the impact this will have on the location that these workers will be transferred from, either.
Also, the supposed benefits have now been scaled down to “coffee shop economics”, meaning that the only new jobs, if any, will be in delivering coffee, newspapers and pizzas to the ATO workers, plus, possibly, local floor cleaners to keep the offices shiny – all of which does not add up to an employment bonanza for the Central Coast, despite the grandiloquent language used to describe the project.
Ms Wicks also comments that Labor “doesn’t understand how tender processes work” in the location of the ATO office, now transmogrified into a “Centre of Excellence”; (how did that happen?) on the old school site. What she refuses to recognise is the real problem which is that nobody understands how the tender process worked because the machinations in this dubious affair have been obfuscated and methodically concealed from public scrutiny. Why can’t Ms Wicks explain in plain language how a property belonging to the NSW public passed into the hands of the ATO for tender purposes and, thence, into the hands of a private developer, with the only restraint on the title being that they must lease a building on the site to the ATO for 10 years.
Where is the evidence that we taxpayers received appropriate compensation in this undercover transaction? As for her aside on the location of the Performing Arts Centre, this is a mere red herring to divert attention from the fact that the site is a bad site for the proposed function. I doubt that many employees will be “walk(ing) up Mann St … on a regular basis”, as she puts it, because the location is an inconvenient one for anybody with lunchtime shopping in mind, even assuming that there is anything being sold on Mann St that one would want to shop for in the lunch hour.
The building should have been used to anchor the business district and create the possibility of foot traffic in the centre, not placed on the far fringe where it will only add another eyesore to the already damaged waterfront. It doesn’t matter whether the Performing Arts Centre is on this site: parenthetically, it has always been my view that the Performing Arts Centre should be in Wyong. The ATO building should not be on this site, and we are entitled to a frank disclosure of the whole train of events leading to this sorry outcome which, it seems, is now immutable.
Email, Feb 15, 2016, Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy