By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
It’s been four years since Scots College won approval to demolish its library, and build a $29 million new student centre modelled on an extravagant Scottish baronial castle.
But in the latest snafu to befall the exclusive $40,000-a-year private school, the castle remains unfinished, mired by frustrating delays and cost blowouts.
An artist impression of the proposal taken from the project’s environmental impact statement.Credit:
Construction began in late 2019, and was initially meant to be completed by 2021. But a briefing on the project produced this year suggested construction would be finished by mid-2023, with an opening by the end of the year. The same document also quoted construction commencing in December 2019 and taking 36 months, so take everything with a grain of salt.
Safe to say that it’s now September and the scaffolding is still up. What’s more, the rumour mill out of Bellevue Hill puts the project’s final costs at closer to $80 million, nearly three times what was initially quoted.
It’s forced the college, which already boasts sporting facilities old enough to make it the laughing stock of Sydney’s elite Greater Public Schools, to keep spending down in other areas.
No wonder parents are now calling the project “Ian Lambert’s vanity castle” after the school’s principal.
So how did things spiral out of control? The official story is blame COVID (which never stopped construction) or bad weather (which didn’t stop neighbouring Cranbrook from finishing its own $125 million development on time). And apparently they found some sand at the bottom of the construction site.
But Scots insiders suggested the difficulties of acquiring sandstone and slates from Scotland helped contribute to delays, which seems to be taking the whole gaudy pastiche a little far.
Scots did not respond to CBD’s questions or return our calls. Perhaps the school is still reeling from its last PR disaster – when an allegedly homophobic sermon delivered at assembly by a Presbyterian preacher drew so much anger from parents that Lambert was forced to apologise.
And if the response to the building fiasco is anything to go by, there’s plenty of anger still around.
TUDGE REPORT
At CBD, we’re keen documenters of the political afterlife, so the question of what one of the Morrison government’s most scandal-prone ministers – Alan Tudge – would do in the real world had us intrigued.
We recently reported that Tudge had dipped his toes into private consulting, and now it seems like the former education minister has found a gig as a columniser.
School principles: Alan Tudge and Gina Rinehart.Credit: John Shakespeare
Not with The Australian, or even one of the News Corp tabloids, but with The Spectator Australia, the conservative rag that shares all the goofy politics but none of the prestige of its British parent publication.
Thanks to an affair with a staffer scandal, a robodebt scandal and a commuter car park rorting scandal, it’s almost forgotten that Tudge was one of the last government’s truest culture warriors.
His first Spectator piece, published last month, appears to be a bold defence of the robo-debt affair. While a recent royal commission described some of Tudge’s actions as “a reprehensible abuse of power” (findings he denies), the minister in charge had a different take.
“Scott Morrison referred to the robo-debt royal commission as a ‘lynching’. I call it a missed opportunity.”
Specifically, a missed opportunity to crack down properly on welfare compliance.
Tudge’s latest effort is a gushing tribute to Campion College, a western Sydney Catholic liberal arts institution that recently named a building after Gina Rinehart. The college, Tudge wrote, stood out “among the postmodern rot that infests most of our universities’ humanities faculties,” owing to its focus “on the origins and brilliance of our Western civilisation”.
We asked him if all these hot takes were going to become a regular thing. Let’s hope he’s more punctual with the Spectator because he missed our deadline.
FULL DISCLOSURE
It’s amazing what passes for the “public interest” these days – the federal Department of Industry Science and Resources has certainly developed a novel understanding of the concept.
Our WA Today colleague Peter Milne asked the department to supply, under freedom of information legislation, some official documents about the decommissioning of clapped-out offshore oil and gas infrastructure.
You can have them, a departmental official told Milne, but in the “public interest” he would have to wait until today to get them so as not to “affect departmental operations and ministerial considerations”.
CBD has had its share of FOI knockbacks, lord knows, but that’s a new one on us.
Milne wondered if those ministerial considerations included what looks like a carefully planned and strategic drip-feed of information from Resources Minister Madeleine King’s office on Tuesday, culminating in the “announceable” of an issues paper on the, um, issue of decommissioning, with a big number – $60 billion – attached.
We asked King’s office if it was indeed political desire to tightly control the message on this matter that trumped the public’s timely right to know.
“No,” said a spokesman. “The minister’s office did not ask the department for a delay in the release of the document.”
And we’ll just have to leave it there.