Somewhere in the new broom administration of New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell, the economic consequences of the weekend announcement by Victoria’s peak business body of its enthusiasm for a third Melbourne airport is probably under acute analysis.
The push by the Victorian Employers’ Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VECCI) is framed in terms of eclipsing Sydney as the economic capital of Australia, well, at least of the eastern half of the continent.
O’Farrell, in football terms, is the Premier who grabbed the hospital pass in winning the last NSW election.
So many essential projects have been neglected or bungled in Sydney infrastructure that at precisely the moment its national economic contribution is failing, it needs impossibly large amounts of money, mostly from non-NSW taxpayers, to build the new motorways, underground railways, and a second Sydney basin airport, that most of its ageing, entitled and anti-development voters don’t want.
These undelivered projects have been hostage for decades to a handful of marginal federal and state seats where resistance to a second Sydney Airport is considered a prerequisite for electoral victory, in communities that have never made a connection between mortgage and commuter misery with a lack of heavy duty economic activity.
Instead, the ground rules in Sydney require policies intended to replicate rural serenity and a mindset that espouses infrastructure welfare.
Sydney is thus the ultimate in toxic infrastructure environments, and it can be argued that the far more new-wealth-friendly business and economic establishments of Victoria and Queensland know this, and can smell blood.
The biggest if not easiest source of economic expansion that those states can access is from those activities that NSW drives away by relegating to the political and funding too-hard baskets the fundamental essentials of a new second airport in the Sydney basin, as well as cost-efficient road, rail and maritime expansions.
The rot extends to the top in that Sydney’s business leaders, and the tourism lobby, perpetuate the politically correct but economically nonsensical propositions that ended Sydney having a working harbour, and frustrated the building of a convenient second airport.
The contortions NSW business leaders go to in avoiding publicly recognising the obvious longer-term and interlinked consequences of less development, less generation of public revenues, and infrastructure gridlock might suit their immediate access to those dispensing power in a short-term political cycle, but the value of major assets they represent, such as CBD real estate, including the Bananaroo plan, will inevitably be eroded by the defection of new and existing major generators of economic activity to Mega-Melbourne, and its natural enemy, Mega-BrisVegas.
Add to the mix an ethically corrupt misuse of financial engineering to drain away most of the tolls imposed on private public transport partnerships into fees rather than capital repayments, and their pricing at levels rarely seen in the US, Europe or the UK and the task of retaining NSW economic primacy seems too high to pay in anything like a reasonable period of time.
Sydney needs at least two new underground rail lines, an integration of the M4 motorway with the city and Botany Bay, with a further integration northwards to the F3 freeway leading into the troubled Pacific Highway, a solution to unclogging road and rail through the northern Illawarra escarpment, and of course, an new airport that isn’t halfway to Victoria or Queensland away.
It is all very, very hard, and deliberately so. And comparatively speaking, it is so very, very easy in Melbourne.
How insane is this article. The rest of the world is moving to VFT services and Melbourne wants 4 airports? The article says 3rd but there are 3 existing – Tullamarine, Moorabbin and Avalon taking interstate flights. This certainly kills the line that Bob Brown is running the country. The economic and environmental benefits of VFT are overwhelming and the Chinese seem to know how to build them using plenty of Aussie iron ore in the process. It is really not that hard to see what is the right option here.
Of course Sydney and Melbourne need high speed rail. But if we are going to have over 1000 extra weekly flights to China, Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia by 2020, a doubling of trans Tasman flights, and even high growth in the next 20 years transcontinental and to northern Australia, in jets closer to the size of an A380 than a 737, these trains will be totally useless.
In my career I was lectured by the powerful as to why Australia would never need more than 16 eight eight seat turboprops a day between Sydney and Melbourne, and even 25 years ago, was dutifully reporting expert opinions that Sydney mightn’t see more than 10 million passengers a year until about now, when it is doing almost four times as many.
Australia has a 100% fail score when it comes to assessing and providing for growth.
Why so gloomy Ben? In Sydney we are at least getting new trams. The Herald (slow news week) has been abuzz! About technology right out of the 19th century!
Actually we’re not. We are getting “feasibility” studies of “possible” routes. The one tram line already announced by the previous government, a few kms on an existing old good line, has been put on hold til end of 2014, or possibly indefinitely. Some of those entitled inner west voters seeking “rural serenity” in the inner city didn’t like the fact that the tram line was going to bring people (on cycles!) near them.
The tram line announced at the same time up the western edge of the city to Barangaroo has already been forgotten.
Wow a reporter prepared to back up his story. Ben you are a true professional. I would have to say though that your your growth model is stuck in pre GFC euphoria and ignores growth constraints. Environment, available land, fuel price pressure (Middle East turmoil) amongst other things. The way to deal with growth constraints is smart alternatives, alternatives that work around constraints are needed not ones that reinforce them. A decent VFT network would take the pressure off the existing airports to handle the growth factors you refer to. Maybe we need a working national broadband network to reduce business travel as well. There are alternatives. I still contend if Sydney can live with 1 airport it seems insane to ask for 4 for Mebourne.
I do not go with your 100% fail score by the way. Mention must be made of John Job Crew Bradfield (1867-1943) who built a bridge that provided the needs of Sydney for 70 years before a second tunnel crossing was required.
JJ Bradfield was one of my childhood heroes. I’d go the Royal Easter Show just to see the incredible working model of all the lines that he planned, all linking into the tiny city rail that was actually built. The tram across the bridge from North Sydney started at the tunnel that curves away along the line of the Manly-Warringah railway, and I’d ride across the bridge on what was supposed to be upgraded to electric trains and use the same tunnel down into Wynyard beside the existing North Shore line tunnels, and was cut by the Cahill Expressway. Dad would show us the unused tunnels around St James, and the grade separation that explained the long time it took to get from there to Museum because the lines curved to link up to an ESR that would have gone along to Bondi Beach via Victoria Barracks and the junction. When the bastardised versiuon of the ESR opened I wrote up the unused mezzanine level, which is where the Southern Suburbs Railway was come in from a line following O’Riordan Street and then under Redfern.
More recently I met and had the privilege of occasionally visiting his last son, Bill Bradfield, who died in 2006. Bill was a distinguished post war aviation administrator both for ICAO in Montreal and in Australia, and the architect of the proposed Towra Point Botany Bay airport post WWII, and later, various proposals for using the southern shores of Botany Bay to the east of Towra Point for additional runway capacity in conjunction with lucrative road and rail link under Bare Island to La Perouse, not only to connect to the older airport, but loop the Cronulla line up to Kingsford where the ESR was originally to terminate and then on to Bondi Junction. This is still in my opinion a very viable set of transport options.
It is frustrating to a degree to grow old yet aware in fine detail of all of the lost opportunities to do sensible things.