With bewilderment I’ll occasionally crunch some numbers to see exactly what governments are giving us for our money.
I’ll drill into a particular road project that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, only to find each square metre of bitumen chews up tens of thousands of dollars.
After I’m finished picking the bits of lunch from where I’d spit on the table, I’ll think of how just a few of those square metres could be paying off the children’s mortgage.
I could wheel my trusty barrow with whatever mix they order and spend days – maybe months – getting my little patch just perfect. Then, ca-ching! I’m a wealthy man.
But Wayne, I hear you say, you don’t have a steamroller. And you’d be right. Just hear me out.
Instead of issuing statements which brag about how much of our hard-earned they’re spending, wouldn’t it be nice if governments let us know of a scenario that showed they were stretching our money further, saving a few pennies, being a touch frugal, a smidgeon clever?
I don’t mean saving money by undertaking swashbuckling sackings of public servants we saw 10 years ago.
No, not that.
I mean, if they said: “Hey look over here, we’re being a bit thrifty and by employing fewer people to lean on shovels, and more people to dig, we’ll be getting this highway done in half the time which means the people doing the digging can move onto the next highway, thereby saving the good taxpayers of Queensland a lot of money.”
It’s “more bang for buck” versus “a whole lot of bang” approach.
But no, instead they boast about how many people they’ve employed and the astronomical amounts of money they’ve spent as if it was a great thing during times of multiple crises, not least the Queen P’s approval rating.
Governments have a habit of doing things that defy laws of economics.
Allow me to explain.
Last week, we were told that a $530 million contract had been awarded to a building company to further expand Logan Hospital.
Don’t get me wrong. Bigger, better hospitals are a good thing.
But let’s break it down a bit. $530,000,000 – the zeroes are intentional – provides 112 beds. That’s a whopping $4,732,142 per bed.
Now, I know hospitals have some boujee-looking beds which support some fancy looking equipment, and additional power points.
But I also see in this newspaper last week that a couple of stores are offering a nice reclining bed for under $3000. That leaves us $4.73 million in change. Per bed.
So I looked around the internet to explore what $4.73 million could buy.
I developed a deepening cough – 20 hectares of land with a farmhouse, a six-bedroom mansion with pool and tennis court at the back of Cornubia, a full set of 15 townhouses, the list goes on.
So I’ve established that $4.73 million in every-day speak is a lot of money.
In government speak, it’s one hospital bed.
Don’t get me wrong, we need the hospital beds. But we need a lot of things.
Which got me thinking. If the government was to buy the 20 hectare block of land, and build the equivalent of 111 townhouses (remember, we’re funding 112 beds here), that would equal 1665 townhouses, or the equivalent of that infrastructure.
Let’s say 10% of those were for storage, 10% for office space – actually, let’s say half of it was for stuff other than hospital beds – that still leaves us with the equivalent of 832.5 townhouses in which we could bunk up patients.
If we were talking actual townhouses, some of the space would be used for a kitchen, living room and three bedrooms. But we’re not.
Hospitals do have some wide corridors through which to race beds on wheels to emergency rooms, but I’m going to conservatively guess that we could fit five beds into the space of one townhouse, multiplied by the number of townhouses – 832.5 – not being utilised by non-bed things.
That’s 4162.5 beds – 37 times the number of beds the government tells us $530 million will give us.
Now, I’m no economist. Nor do I have a background in hospital logistics.
But I do wonder sometimes whether we’re getting good value for money.
Or whether the price of concrete suddenly gets a bit more expensive when it’s being poured from the government coffers?
Hey Wanda, I wish we had a lazy $5 million. I’ve found a side hustle.
