Yet another Sydney transport infrastructure project — $5.3 billion underground CBD Metro — is about to be snuffed.
The death sentence was contained in a brief statement from the Premier’s office reported in the SMH, which despite its problems, has been nailing the issues that a weak government and opposition try to confine to point scoring one-liners rather than expose themselves to the political risks that will arise from candid public discussions.
One of the few growth industries in Sydney is proposing and cancelling public transport projects. The NSW government has probably generated and spiked more plans for heavy rail and light metros than the great public transport cities of the world have built since the early 19th century.
The bills, for consultants, and the career public authority planners, engineers and lawyers who do nothing but massage these ritual bonfires of public monies, could have generated real wealth, and built a model city, and spectacularly influenced the national economy and its construction and design skills and resources for the better. But that isn’t the Sydney way, which is that of helpless, institutionalised failure.
This is not just about Sydney’s decline towards a future as a giant dementia farm in which the second largest economic activity will be social welfare for those who can still remember who they are.
It is about the transfer of business activity, remnant manufacturing, and the warehousing and distribution of imports (that are Ponzi funded by consumer debt that expands faster than consumption) to the less topographically and administratively disadvantaged super cities of Melbourne and Brisbane in the rest of this century.
A prominent Australian rang me yesterday to enthuse over the federal government’s decision not to build a second Sydney airport at Badgery’s Creek. “Ben, Albanese is a genius. He doesn’t want 7 million people in Sydney by the end of the century. He wants them somewhere else.”
He has a point. If Sydney is going to be an impossible place to do business, why help it waste money on a second airport. Just turn the land into another industrial and residential wasteland, devoid of the air and rail connections, social infrastructure and port connections that are critical to its sustainability. Take the Badgery’s Creek real estate money and run. The smart investors will find those parts of Australia where things actually come together in terms of costs and infrastructure.
The elderly and unemployed don’t need metros. Or jets. Just handouts, in one big, poor and dysfunctional sprawl, lost in obscurity between the major centres of late 21st century Australia, stretching from Geelong to beyond Cranbourne in the Melbourne metroplex, and from the Gold Coast to Sunshine coast and inland to Amberley or beyond around Super BrisVegas.
That’s depressing, Ben, but probably true. NIMBYism carried to its ultimate conclusion.
NSW+Labor=failed state.
Scary thought – business activity moving from Sydney to Melbourne & Brisbane. It’s time for a change of state government.
“to the less topographically and administratively disadvantaged super cities of Melbourne and Brisbane”.
Actually there is almost nowhere in Australia to run to, especially if you project 25 or 50 years ahead. As usual Brisbane is several decades behind and is still in the frantic tunnel and bridge building and non-stop road-widening phase. It is just entering the endless fantasy plans for expensive Metros-that-everyone-knows-will-never-get-built phase. As for the Sunshine Coast it is the suburban/exurban sprawl with the least developed public transport in Australia, and is set to become worse because the Gold Coast is filling up but there is still plenty of potential in the north coast for the ugly sprawl Australians (or Australian developers–is there a difference?) love.
Again one feels Rudd could have grabbed urban development and major transport (and I do not mean more roads) as an urgently needed bit of nation-building infrastructure, but again it seems he is not actually that interested. But as disappointed as I am by Rudd, really he just reflects the great Australian complacency. We deserve the government we get (and those NSW voters who believe the opposition will solve any of their problems are deeply delusional–since when did conservatives ever support public transport?).
BTW, Ben, nice article on the glaciers yesterday.
Good article, Ben. Our governments and the planning bureaucrats have no idea what they’re doing. The lack of reliable public transport in all our major cities is testament to this. The worst example is the NW outer suburbs of Sydney where familes have up to 4 cars so everyone can get to work. It has been this way for years with many announcements about rail lines to that area but no action. Similar thing in Melbourne where a new rail track has’t been opened since 1930. Brisbane (my place of birth) is going crazy putting more cars on the already congested roads. The solution is a no brainer – there is plenty of land not too far from the cities and inner suburbs where people work so pick the land to be developed and before a single house is built, construct the bloody rail line into the area. This can be light or conventional rail linking into the existing network. Just do it.