I RARELY waste time and effort re-fighting past battles, however the misinformation in Michael Moore’s column (“Why we have to get light rail right”, CN, October 27) re the Gungahlin Drive Extension battles of a decade ago cannot be permitted to stand uncorrected. 

The GDE was not, as he claims, originally built as a single lane in each direction as a compromise to appease local residents.
The suggestion is nonsensical given that the initial two-lane road through the Canberra Nature Park caused only marginally less destruction than a four-lane road would have (the entire corridor width was mostly cleared in the initial stage), and in any case the Stanhope government’s politically motivated strategy was to ruthlessly crush widespread community opposition (mainly through legal costs), rather than seek to accommodate it.
Nor were opponents almost all local residents, as falsely claimed by Moore; in fact, many did not live anywhere near the planned route and were motivated by higher environmental and economic concerns.
It was in fact because of massive cost blowouts caused by the government’s mismanagement of the project that the GDE could not initially be built as four lanes. The government sought to pin the entire blame for its financial incompetence on the GDE’s opponents, a falsehood apparently accepted unquestioningly by Moore with his claim of “damage” by them.
However, their actions in court and elsewhere actually contributed only marginally to those costs.
History has since shown that the Stanhope government’s claims at the time – that the GDE would cost far less than it ultimately did, would cause minimal environmental damage to the Canberra Nature Park, would completely resolve congestion for Gungahlin residents and that the GDE’s opponents were mischievous in making contrary claims – were all utterly false and were known to be so at the time they were made by the government.
Ironically, Moore is concerned about loss of trees to build the light rail. Where was his concern when vastly greater numbers of them were being chopped down to build the GDE?

Terry George, Kingston

Hasn’t the horse (tram) bolted?

NOW that the “tram” has been given the go ahead (stage one, at least), columnist Michael Moore makes good points about not having overhead wires and preserving trees (“Why we have to get light rail right”, CN, October 27).
However, hasn’t the horse bolted? Mature trees are coming down now on Northbourne Avenue, with replacement young brittle gums already at the nursery.
Murray May, Cook