There is light at the start of tunnel this afternoon in Sydney, when the Prime Minister Julia Gillard anoints for the media the already unofficially announced future completion of the Chatswood-Parramatta suburban rail line, which state Labor stopped dead at Epping seven years ago under the anti-rail policies of former NSW Transport Minister Michael Costa.
The restoration of the project also means that light is at last illuminating the almost invisible attempts by former media star Maxine McKew to hang on to Bennelong, the seat she took off the former Prime Minister, John Howard, in 2007 after which she disappeared from public life until former tennis great John Alexander won the Liberal candidacy and began running her all around the court.
This fascinating match aside, this announcement is a huge electoral plus for Labor, as completing the rail link (by 2017 after a new start in 2014) can notably improve directly and indirectly the lives of all rail commuters in the western half of Sydney including the Blue Mountains towns.
It is also a symbolic, one might hope lasting, breaking of at least 80 years of disgraceful mismanagement of public transport planning and project delivery in NSW.
The cost to the state will be half a billion dollars, or about as much as current Premier Kristina Keneally blew on the cancelled Sydney metro project that she never accurately nor transparently accounted for in its dying months. It is significant that in the official announcement by Transport and Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese, the wording makes it clear NSW is ceding its powers of control and direction of the completion of the Chatswood-Parramatta link to Infrastructure Australia, which will provide the other $2.1 billion in funding.
NSW, no matter what the government, cannot be trusted with infrastructure dollars, as the mal-administration of transport projects is hard-wired into the state’s public service as much as it is into its politics.
This is a project with potential. At Westmead, where the tunnels will emerge from the new underground platforms at Parramatta, studies have already identified a lower-cost route through the poorly served newer western housing estates of Sydney to Leppington, and the existing Chatswood or eastern end of the line begs to be part of an extension that could become a much needed second Sydney Harbour rail crossing.
The pre-media event statement contains darkness as well as light.
“Federal Labor will also have Infrastructure Australia work with the NSW Government to explore private financing options for the M5 East widening and the F3 to M2 upgrade.”
But recent private public ventures, three of them financial basket cases in the Lane Cove Tunnel, the Cross City Tunnel and the Airport Link rail line, involved the sacrifice of hundreds of millions of up-front incentive dollars by the NSW government, and in the case of the road projects, dishonest traffic predictions that were accompanied by street closures that massively dislocated public and private transport users until, in part, they were undone.
Private public partnerships in transport projects have in the past two decades morphed into financial engineering ventures in which claims have been made that well over 70% of toll revenues have been syphoned into fees and dividends rather than the repayment of capital costs. The biggest bank or finance fee paid by many Sydneysiders today is hidden in the electronic tolls they rack up twice or more times each working day.
The results has been some of the highest road tolls in the world, and on the Airport Rail link, fare loadings on the four underground stations that were built for it are so high, they price them out of reach for many travellers and 25,000 commuters whose jobs are airport related, or located near the stations.
Former NSW auditor Tony Harris often pointed out that for about one fifth the project cost of some private public partnerships, the state could have built them, and charged a much lower toll, and repaid the capital costs in a similar or shorter period.
The engagement of private equity in future infrastructure projects is going to need a lot more than a good news pre-election announcement to dispel this darkness that obscures banks ripping off the public purse as so-called partners in much-needed new rail and road developments.
I do hope The Australian isn’t too hard on the NSW ALP in this instance as it is one of their regular contributors, the space-waste Michael Costa, who decided on the back of “studies” that the Epping-Parramatta stretch wasn’t worth it.
Neither Gillard nor Swan live in Sydney which is handy for them and their confreres in NSW Labor have famously failed to deliver on transport promises. Forgive me for invoking that old cynical chesnut ‘I’ll believe it when I see it”.
In fairness Ben, M. McKew has been to every envelope opening in her electorate the last three years. I don’t know what you’re basing your claim of her laxness on, but it is quite wrong.
It was corrupt transport policy making involving a narrow clique of ALP trusties/cronies in the green NGO movement that surely in part caused the $1B blowout with rail going under the Lane Cove River.
Judy Messer, then chair of the NSW Nature Conservation Council. Noel Plumb allied to the preferences for John Watkins in the seat of Ryde are two notables. Jeff Angel at TEC no doubt.
That decision under the river was a public finances disaster for minimal environmental/transport advantage and showed just how deep ALP mutualism had seeped into the peak green groups at that time around 2002-3 and years preceding. The grants machine, and they came pretty cheap too.
This policy corruption is one sound reason why the Green Party had to be invented in the early 90ies in NSW to achieve financial independence from the policy spivs in the ALP.
Oh of course Carr will wax lyrical about federal immigration policy crueling infrastructure spend in Sydney – but that $1B blowout around 2005 was all his own work – not least because the original bridge option was opposed by select green figures Carr needed to keep a lid on the corrupt forest decisions made earlier, and the robust green movement more broadly. A closed shop of policy disaster, aided and abetted it might be said by the pro woodchipping Sydney Morning Herald during that time.
If those ALP matey greenocrats had blown the whistle like they should have, given the real analysis of the maps behind the “300 new national parks” then Carr would have lost his moral platform years earlier than the damning polls of mid 2005. (Fact is NSW is 80M hectares in size and very little is forest yet we still woodchip whole trees from this rare landscape category, at just as high a volume as when Carr was elected on March 25, 1995. Woodchipping causes dry regrowth which is prone to wildfire.)
If this press release is a guide (@http://www.newsroom.uts.edu.au/news/detail.cfm?ItemId=6543) the Lane Cove crossing fiasco also prevented the building of a station at what is to become a multi-campus Kuring-Gai TAFE, UTS and relocated Chatswood High School development.
This happened because the depth of the station under the TAFE site became excessive taking into account the burying of the route under the Lane Cove River bed.
This repeats the lost opportunity to link the UNSW campus into the metropolitan rail network when the Eastern Suburbs Railway terminated at Bondi Junction.
At that time the cost in mid-70s dollars of running the mole all the way to Kingsford Junction was an additional $10 million, but the moment that machinery was packed up and sent away, the cost in those dollars rose to $170 million.