(Image: Private Media/Mitchell Squire)

Although Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce isn’t particularly well known for his grasp of reality, yesterday saw one of his more amusing fantasies uttered to Parliament.

Joyce told question time yesterday that Australia’s most expensive infrastructure disaster ever, the $15 billion inland rail project (original estimated cost of $4.7 billion, then $9.9 billion, and since the end of last year, over $15 billion — any takers for $20 billion?) would be a major carbon abatement initiative because it would take a large volume of trucks off the road — 150 or 110 B-doubles for each train that shuttled between Melbourne and Brisbane.

The Australian Rail Track Corporation, which is building and which will run the boondoggle, claims the line will take 200,000 trucks off the road a year (a Senate committee recently criticised the project — not for being a waste of money but for not being grandiose enough).

The line won’t do anything of the sort — but we’ve pointed out the nonsensical maths of inland rail many times over the years. The business case, prepared in 2015 by a panel headed by former Nationals leader and infrastructure minister John Anderson, has been taken down by the government presumably because — apart from revealing that the line would barely make its operating costs back let alone repay its capital costs — it estimates it will cost only $9.9 billion to build, a number that now looks ludicrously optimistic.

But luckily there’s a copy tucked away here, and it’s the source for the “150 trucks” line from Joyce.

So, does his statement show he believes we should be reducing emissions, even if we’re blowing tens of billions in the process? Yeah, nah.

Let’s examine Joyce’s claim that it will be some sort of carbon abatement measure. As it turns out, it’s a complete fabrication. As the 2015 business case showed, inland rail will rely on increases in thermal coal exports to make money — in fact, the inland rail business case foresees a more than doubling of coal exports carried by the network.

The business case says the line will “be a catalyst for additional coal exports from south-east Queensland to the port of Brisbane by providing a more direct and cost-effective route over the Toowoomba range. With complementary investment in branch lines, it is expected that this market could grow from the current movement of approximately 8 million tonnes to around 19.5 million tonnes per year.”

According to the business case: “The coal task in 2025 represents over half of the total demand for inland rail by volume.”

But hang on. The government is spending $15 billion on the inland rail route (plus the money to be spent on “complementary investment in branch lines”) with no hope of ever making the money back and with the goal of more than doubling Queensland thermal coal exports through Brisbane?

Yes, you’re starting to see now. Inland rail isn’t just another rotten Nationals rort, like the idiotic Alice Springs-Darwin line built by the Howard government that now serves to carry a few Bollinger-soused oldies up and back to the Top End at great expense. It’s a coal export subsidy scheme — and a huge one, at $15 billion (at least), plus whatever losses the Australian Rail Track Corporation makes every year when it runs it.

That Joyce is lying when he claims it will reduce emissions isn’t just him being a moron. It’s a cover for the grim truth that inland rail is yet another taxpayer handout to the coal industry orchestrated by the denialists of the Coalition.