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Update: Wagners to bid for Badgerys build -

Via the Oz:

Wagner family flies a $3.5bn bid to build Badgerys airport

John Wagner, with one of his helicopters at Mt Coot-tha in Brisbane, plans to put in a tender to build and operate the new Badgerys Creek airport. Picture: Glenn Hunt
 
Jamie Walker, Jennine Khalik
The Australian
12:00AM May 10, 2017

Queensland’s rich-listed Wagner family will bid to build and operate western Sydney’s Badgerys Creek airport, confident it can do the job for less and sooner than envisaged by the federal government.

Announcing the family company would go for the huge contract, most likely in partnership with a top-tier construction firm, director John Wagner said the new gateway should be operational within three years of work starting on the greenfield site.

And he insisted his company could build the new airport west of Sydney for “well south” of the flagged $5 billion to $6bn price tag, with his projections of the cost starting at $3.5bn. “If you are going to spend the money, you spend it quickly, throw resources at the job … get it done and start to get a return on it,” Mr Wagner said. “You need a good architect, terminal engineers, good pavement engineers … and you need to look at things laterally. The rest is pretty straight forward.”

Delivering the government’s 2017-18 budget last night, Treasurer Scott Morrison said earthworks would start at Badgerys Creek in the second half of next year to complete the project by 2026.

Mr Wagner is in a unique position to know what it takes to get a major airport off the ground: the family firm defied the sceptics to build from scratch the first international-standard general purpose airport to come off the drawing board in Australia for nearly 50 years outside his home town of Toowoomba.

The Wagner Group’s Brisbane West Wellcamp Airport can handle airliners up to the Boeing 747 and was completed in just 19 months and 11 days, opening in November 2014.

Scheduled services now fly to Sydney, Melbourne, Townsville and Cairns, while Cathay Pacific Airways has looped Wellcamp into a weekly freight run to Hong Kong. Chartered tourist flights to China have begun.

Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher said yesterday he met Mr Wagner and his brothers earlier this year, and the company would be welcome to tender for the project when it was put to market by the government.

“There is considerable interest in the construction market to build the western Sydney airport,” Mr Fletcher said. “The government has been engaging with the construction market for some time on the project.”

Questioning the preliminary costing of up to $6bn for stage 1 infrastructure at Badgerys Creek including a 3.7km-long runway, passenger terminal, taxiway and tarmac areas, Mr Wagner said: “To me, that seems like a very big number.”

From the limited specifications released in a government project plan last December, he believed the family company could build the airport for “somewhere north” of $3.5bn but well less than $6bn.

“We have done very preliminary work off the limited information in the public domain,” Mr Wagner said. “But until we see the tender documents we won’t know what’s included, what’s not, so it is very difficult to comment with any great certainty.”

Describing the $6bn price estimate as “hard to believe”, Mr Wagner told ABC radio yesterday that the project “shouldn’t cost that much”.

The Wagner Group ran every aspect of the $200 million Wellcamp build on company-owned land 16km west of the Toowoomba CBD, from laying the 2870m runway to erecting and fitting out the 8500sq m terminal, designed for 1.5 million passengers a year.

“While an airport is quite complex, it’s really a job of work,” Mr Wagner told The Australian. “Once the design has been done it’s a matter of getting enough people in to do it. We would be more than comfortable building it ourselves. It wouldn’t frighten us at all.”

However, the scale would be of another magnitude to Wellcamp, with Stage 1 of the second Sydney airport to be built to handle 10 million passenger movements annually. Some of the economies exploited by the Wagners for their prototype airport would not be available. At Wellcamp, they established rock quarries on site to provide runway fill, and the company’s local workforce was deployed in around-the-clock shifts, seven days a week during the construction phase.

But Mr Wagner said Wellcamp had shown the value of a single managing contractor. “You can save a hell of a lot of time doing things yourself. If you have got the one contractor doing the lot, the terminal can be done in parallel with the runway, there are no crossover disputes about getting access to certain parts of the site. You can actually do the work in parallel to the design being done,” he said.

The Wagner Group also drew heavily on its experience in quarrying, concreting, and manufacturing hi-tech composite building materials and fabricated platforms. The Toowoomba-based business run by Mr Wagner and his brothers, Denis, Neill and Joe, ranks 14th on the BRW Rich Families List with an estimated net worth of $955m in 2015.

Mr Wagner said he would probably look to forming a consortium with a “big builder” to tackle Badgerys Creek. “It’s a big project, it’s a national project, and I think the government would want one of the big guys in with a company such as us to make sure it was executed,” he said.

MTF...P2