In what kind of weird world does an infrastructure “pipeline” provided by the federal government direct nearly $2.6 billion to Victoria, $2.5 billion to the Northern Territory, nearly $1.5 billion to Queensland — and just $1 billion to NSW?
NSW generates more than 30% of the nation’s GDP, but the Albanese government has decided it should get just 10% of the infrastructure funding, it unveiled yesterday.
It’s great news for the Victorian government, which is weeks out from an election. Not such good news for the Perrottet government, which goes to the polls in March.
Why did NSW miss out? According to federal Infrastructure Minister Catherine King, “we had a slightly different relationship in opposition with the Victorians than we did with New South Wales, so we didn’t really have a lot of projects on the table from opposition from them”.
By that telling, Labor in opposition came to the NSW government looking for projects to fund but got turned away, while Labor governments in Melbourne, Brisbane and Darwin had a better “relationship” and so got the cash. That’ll learn ’em.
That’s not to say Labor is turning its back on projects beloved by the Coalition. Why is the NT getting so much money, especially compared to NSW? During the 2022 election campaign, in an effort to win the seat of Solomon, former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce announced $1.5 billion to develop new port facilities at Middle Arm in Darwin for gas exporters, saying “Australians must embrace the fact that it is our resources sector that pays for the services and opportunities we all enjoy, and without coal and gas and iron ore we would be weaker and poorer.”
Labor, worried about Solomon, immediately matched Joyce’s commitment. So now taxpayers are forking out $1.5 billion for some pork promised by Joyce to his fossil fuel industry donors during the election.
There’s no business case for the project — surprise! — because it’s not even fully clear what the project is. All we know is that King is now trying to claim it’s not about fossil fuel exports. She described the project as “planned equity to support the construction of common user marine infrastructure within the Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct, providing a pathway to a decarbonised economy by helping emerging clean energy industries”.
This isn’t a few hundred million for some dodgy car parks — it’s $1.5 billion, more than all the money given to NSW, being spent on something that’s not quite clear, for benefits that haven’t been identified, purely because Labor felt it needed to match the Coalition’s pork-barrelling. As it turned out, it didn’t — the CLP vote collapsed in May, handing Labor’s Luke Gosling a 6.2% 2PP swing.
So this is the way the government will run infrastructure policy: it all depends on the “relationship” you have with Labor, and projects without any clear benefit will get funded if they’re in the right seat.
For a party that promised to clean up infrastructure funding allocation, end pork-barrelling and put sense back into infrastructure planning and delivery, it’s a shoddy start to spending, especially after King moved quickly to detoxify the board of Infrastructure Australia and review the $20 billion coal export subsidy: the inland rail disaster.
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LNP starved Victoria of infrastructure funds for past decade to punish Victoria for not being Sydney
And that also as The Lying Rodent©Senator George Brandis ha said,“Victoria has had a history for quite some years now, some decades, in fact, of being slightly more to the centre-left,” he explained. “The Massachusetts of Australia, some people call it.”
MA has the highest percentage of bachelor’s, graduate and professional degree-holders, and the highest average university quality, which gives it the highest rating overall fro education in the USA.
Which some people and could it be that the good citizens of VIC are just too smart and well educated to be taken in by the Lying Nasty Party?
Infrastructure has been subject to political favouritism, ideology and rorting for so long and by every party to government. Labor might be criticised for a perceived disparity in allocation to NSW as compared to Victoria but that has to be contextualised after the almost decade long discrimination by the Coalition towards Victoria. Meanwhile the Greens are proposing a $2.5 billion bike network around Melbourne at a time when there are currently 350 road closures across the state and there will be a helluva clean up and repair bill as a result of these floods. Pity the delay in the adoption of electric vehicles by Coalition policies but they will need good roads too. The Greens Melbourne-centric acutely ideological policy is very ill-timed.
I don’t doubt that some of these spending decisions are questionable, and it is good to have journalists questioning them, but:
This is a non sequitur. The NSW contribution to GDP tells us nothing about its proper share of the spending pot. It could just as easily indicate NSW is already well provided with infrastructure and so spending in other states instead is more beneficial. Keane is usually better than this.
Not when it comes to Labor.
Or Sydney.
No he isn’t. He is just a s###-stirrer.
Perhaps the ALP government remembers how much NSW ‘got’ under previous LNP governments?
This may all be true, but the NSW Government are also spruiking a $1.6 billion bid to raise Warragamba Dam, an echo of failed 1960s water management policies which will not protect the western Sydney floodplain or residents, but will cause severe damage to a World Heritage area, and happens to coincide with the interests of 2020s developers (who also just succeeded in stripping out some simple controls from NSW planning, such as not using dark roof tiles). A far better water management strategy, at far less cost, would be to lower the water level and use the existing dam for flood management.
What is the Federal government supposed to do: fund this boondoggle?
I wonder if raising the dam wall to a height it wasn’t designed for is engineering a massive disaster if it fails. There’s more flood events coming due to climate change. Which the mad hatters in the NP/LNP are still in denial about despite the evidence sloshing around their waists. They favour big dams as a solution to everything, Taming nature. Keeping the bears out of the cave.
One thing is clear, the COALition still doesn’t comprehend irony https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/oct/16/liberals-accuse-albanese-government-of-playing-favourites-in-infrastructure-spending
Indeed. I doubt I’ll have a bigger laugh all week than the one I had when I heard Bridget McKenzie on RN Breakfast this morning complaining about the politicisation of infrastructure spending. Not comprehending irony doesn’t even come close to describing the National Party.
Never the slightest hint of self-awareness in that mob, unfortunately. As Robert Burns wrote,
“O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An’ foolish notion.”
And yet, wee timorous beasties that we are in refusing to change our voting habits, we cannot complain when the best laid schemes o’ mice & men gang aft agley.
Yes but me intercede and translate. “Gang aft a-gley” is Scottish vernacular for oft go astray. I don’t believe these plans were best laid and seem to be done so in order that some may profit exorbitantly. They certainly are not best paid for the rest of us.