Matt Cunningham: NT Government still spending before it does any cost analysis

TIME and time again the NT Govenrment spends before it actually does any cost analysis, writes MATT CUNNINGHAM

At least, if we’re going to keep spending without analysing the cost benefit, we’ll have good sporting facilities. Picture: Glenn Campbell

THERE are few more valuable pieces of real estate in Darwin than the stretch of land that runs along Mindil Beach from Darwin High School to the casino.

Perched right in the middle of this prime piece of land is a tennis centre. It’s a good one.

Between 2009 and 2011 it hosted several ITP tournaments featuring players including Alicia Molik, Casey Dellaqua, John Millman and Olivia Rogowska.

It was the perfect place for a professional tennis tournament, right next to the casino accommodation and the Mindil Beach markets.

A big crowd turned out to watch on the makeshift centre court in 2009 as Molik – a former world number eight – made a long-awaited return from injury, beating Great Britain’s Emily Webley-Smith in the final.

These days it’s looking a bit tired. The courts are cracked and it could desperately do with some shade.

But it’s nothing a couple of million bucks couldn’t fix.

You could resurface the courts, build a decent show court, upgrade the club house and shade the entire facility.

This all probably should have happened three or four years ago.

Of course we know it didn’t. What happened instead can be marked down as another installment in a long list of wasteful NT Government spending.

The former CLP Government committed $16.7 million to build a brand new tennis centre out at Marrara.

By the time it was finished it had already run more than a million dollars over budget.

About $500,000 was spent returning PFAS-contaminated dirt that was removed from the site before the proper checks were made, with the Government picking up the bill.

Tennis NT insisted it should manage the project, and finished up with a centre court that was built on a slope.

More than six months later that embarrassing stuff-up still hasn’t been fixed, and no-one seems to know how much it will cost.

But the real scandal here is not the sloping tennis court, it’s the fact the tennis centre was built in the first place.

As we wake up to the hangover caused by a 15-year long, GST-funded spending orgy and wonder how we got to this point, it’s these sorts of decision we might want to re-examine.

If a fraction of the money spent on the new Darwin tennis centre was instead spent at Gardens, we could have had a superior facility in a far better location.

You have to wonder what, if any, sort of cost-benefit analysis was done before this decision was made?

But this case is not an isolated one.

We’ve spent $18 million on a new, indoor netball centre built right next to the outdoor netball courts that were built less than a decade ago.

We play netball in the dry season, at night, so why did we need to spend bucketloads of money we don’t have on an indoor stadium?

If there’s an occasional top-level match that needs to be played indoors, then surely this could be done at the basketball stadium across the road, as has been the case in the past.

The cost to run the air-conditioning alone at the new netball centre must be eye-watering.

If sport’s not your thing, consider the $19.4 million being forked out so 450 cars can park underground next to Parliament House.

The Government tells us it’s a “job creating project”, but how many jobs for how long does the $19.4 million buy?

And then, of course, there’s the new Palmerston hospital, standing brightly as a triumph of politics over policy (and sound financial management).

Last week’s Budget papers didn’t break down how much of the $146 million blow-out in the NT Health Department’s bottom line was due to the new hospital, but you can bet it was a sizeable chunk.

These decision are not only seeing money spent where it shouldn’t be, but are also leaving us with ongoing costs that will hit the Budget bottom-line year after year.

In 2018 the NT Government bugeted an extra $25 million to run the Palmerston Hosptial, a figure the Auditor General later found to be well below the actual sum required.

So why is this happening?

Former WA Under Treasurer John Langoulant offers a clue in his report into NT budget repair.

“The current policy development process utilised by the Territory Government (as reflected ih the Cabinet submission template) does not mandate the inclusion of an evaluation process for new initiatives,” he writes.

Thankfully, Langoulant also offers a way forward.

He devotes an entire chapter of his report to evidence-based decision making and program evaluation.

“Evidence-based policy prioritises rigorous research findings, data, analytics and evaluation of new innovations above anecdotes, ideology, marketing and inertia around the status quo,” he writes.

But despite accepting almost all of Langoulant’s recommendations, the Government doesn’t appear to have taken it all in.

This week it announced it is bringing back the Arafura Games in 2021.

The decision has been made before a cost-benefit analysis has been done on this year’s Games, and appears to have been made based simply on the “buzz” around the city.

We might not know if the benefits of this year’s Games outweigh the cost, but at least we had some top-class sporting facilities to play them on.

And by the time they return in 2021, the show court at the Darwin tennis centre might even be flat.