The NSW government dropped a bomb on us, says a light rail contractor in Sydney | Australia news

The Spanish contractor in charge of the construction of the delayed light rail in Sydney said that he would never have agreed to start the project if he had access to what one of the senior managers described as a document creepy.

Bede Noonan, chief executive of Acciona Australia, said Thursday during a parliamentary inquiry in New South Wales about the besieged project that the government had not provided essential information about electric utilities.

"Receiving these instructions from Ausgrid after the signing of the contract, it was as if Transport for NSW dropped us a bomb," Noonan said in the investigation.

He added that TfNSW had provided Acciona with crucial plans only a month after the signing of the light rail construction contract in early 2015.

"Our utility manager, who attended all pre-contract workshops to develop treatment plans, wrote in an e-mail in March 2015 that the guidelines were a" crap document, "he said. . "I do not know why they decided not to divulge such important information. All our understanding was thrown out the window. "

The costs of the light rail project linking downtown Sydney to the eastern suburbs increased from $ 1.6 billion to $ 2.1 billion.

Noonan said that Acciona would never have agreed to embark on the light rail if the Ausgrid information had been provided to the company sooner.

"I am here to inform the committee and the NSW people that if these Ausgrid guidelines had been provided to our consortium in early February, we would not have signed the contracts and the project. 39 would not have been conducted as he did, "Noonan said. I said. "The non-application of these guidelines was a fundamental mistake on the part of TfNSW."

The NSW opposition again criticized the government's treatment of the project. Labor spokeswoman Jodi Mackay told reporters that the light rail is tearing the heart of the CBD.

She invited the Prime Minister, Gladys Berejiklian, and the Minister of Transport, Andrew Constance, to step in and fix the problem.

The evidence presented before the investigation clearly shows that the government knows that the cost of the project will increase further, Mackay said. "I think the community deserves to know the cost of this project. It's a project dog – they should know the cost. "