Today the federal government announced a review, to be led by Kerry Schott, into the inland rail project. Infrastructure Minister Catherine King described the project as “over budget, behind schedule and with no plan for where it will start or end”.
There’s no review needed for the inland rail project. It should simply be stopped, immediately. Every single dollar spent on it is wasted and will never be recouped. That’s not personal opinion. That’s the original business case (now curiously hard to find on any government site) — a business case prepared when the project was going to cost $5 billion to build. It’s since blown out to $15 billion, and Barnaby Joyce committed the Coalition to waste another $5 billion (at least) extending it to Gladstone.
It’s a massive white elephant. Except, that’s a smear on pachyderms. To call it a dog is to demean our canine friends. The inland rail line won’t just lay there rusting in the countryside. Its whole purpose is to subsidise coal exports by offering below-cost rail transport for coal miners — 35% below cost, according to the agency building it, the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC). The ARTC has said it quite clearly: “access charges have been set to maximise rail volumes rather than to maximise financial revenue”. The extension to Gladstone is also designed to subsidise coal exports out of Gladstone.
But when David Crowe, handed a drop by King about the review, came to inform readers about the review today, none of that was mentioned (to be fair to Crowe, no other press gallery journalist has ever covered the thing properly, either). The only indirect reference was Barnaby Joyce claiming that Labor might not open more coal mines (we wish). Indeed, Crowe referred to the project as replacing “thousands of trucks on major highways”.
There’ll be no thousands of trucks replaced. What there’ll be is taxpayer-subsidised coal trains giving fossil fuel companies a handout, which was always the point of the inland rail project in the first place.
You’d think a $20 billion subsidy to the Coalition’s coal miner donors would be of interest to journalists, but evidently not.
The media is too scared to expose the really mega rorts. A decade back Michael West was writing for the SMH and among other things exposed the systematic ‘gold-plating’ of the power network by the big gentailers, a rort which added hugely to our power bills. Rather than celebrate his work the Herald continued to parrot rubbish about the carbon tax and was happy to see Michael depart.
I think a fast passenger/ freight link between Melbourne and Brisbane would be a good idea with a well- thought-out route and a motor-rail facility. Get rid of the B-doubles and triples on the Newell.
Think related lobbyists preferring inland rail would not be just miners, but airlines on the lucrative Mel-Syd-Bris route that would be threatened by reliable high speed railway running on an east coast route.
And of course existing trucking and road logistics.
That was the original point of it. It’s full steaming still. Just there is literally no end on the Brisneyland end. Where? How?
Anything that has Joyce’s fingerprints on it should be shelved.
More useful would be a red hot go at a very fast rail network for the country.
The late 19th & early 29th century saw investment in infrastructure like rail & telecommunications that’s never been replicated. Everything now is half arsed, piecemeal & ultimately inefficient.
You can’t expect Alan to support a competing mode of transport.
No he is doing it all by himself!
Well said. Would be an astonishing waste of money.
I wonder how much the agrarian perception of Inland Australia is shaping what Inland rail means. With Australia wanting to ramp up agricultural exports over the coming decade (Ag2030), when I hear Inland rail, the exporting of crops is the first thing I think about. How else are we meant to get $100,000,000,000 worth of crops from where they are grown to where they are exported??
Of course, this agrarian perception is the National’s bread and butter…
It will be very difficult to be the food bowl of Asia when most agricultural land in the nation will be adversely affected by climate change in the form of drought, flood, fire, storm, and tempest.
The major parties are addicted to income from digging stuff up and shipping it overseas, and gambling. They have no answer for the time when it’s all gone.
Given the link between climate and agriculture, you’d think that the Nationals would be on the front line of the fight against climate change. Given the politics as it stands, I can’t see that happening.
The best we’ll get is whinging that Australia needs to do more to help farmers from drought, from flooding, from heat waves, from bushfires, etc. Just as long as we don’t point out they are occurring more frequently and with more severity, and don’t say it has anything to do with burning fossil fuels.