All hail the light rail decision! Nick Greiner takes a beating

It was Sunday morning and Joadja, Jesse Dingo, and I, were taking our constitutional in Sydney Park.

Under leaden skies, the park was drying out relentlessly. Verdant stretches of lawn were turning brown, trees were dying, the lakes, brimming over a few months ago, were shrinking to tiny shallow pools surrounded by a fast-drying muddy margin.

The weather was infuriating. Heat built up through the day and the afternoons were a muggy stew. In past years there would have been evening thunderstorms and cooling showers, but now they never seemed to happen.

“Are we ever going to see blue skies again? Are we ever going to see a decent shower of rain?”Joadja asked, as she pitched Jesse another fast ball over the dry grass.

“Looks like yet another year when it’s hardly worthwhile going to the beach. I thought at least the passage from La Nina to El Nino might mean some sparking summer weather as compensation for drought, but we’re getting day after gloomy day. If this is the future of our climate, it’s really quite depressing.”

“Oh well, at least there’s the light rail decision”, I said.

“Yeah, that’s great, historic – a real game-changer. And of course the rejection of Infrastructure NSW’s bus tunnel plan is a blow to Nick Greiner’s credibility. Why on earth did he put up something as stone crazy as that?”

“Well it helps to understand that Infrastructure NSW is just a front for a disparate bunch of self-interested industry players, and one of those players is the private bus industry. They see themselves as being in competition with a light rail solution.

“Nevertheless, the bus tunnel wasn’t a plan to do something about bus congestion in the CBD, it was just a spoiler – a purported alternative ‘solution’ thrown in to try to block Cabinet adopting the George Street light rail route. In point of fact there was no bus tunnel plan – there was zilch actual planning or design – just a dumb concept. A Cabinet vote for the bus tunnel wouldn’t have been a vote to actually do something, it would have been a vote to do nothing at all, whereas light rail is virtually shovel-ready.”

“But I still don’t understand why Greiner put his whole credibility on the line trying to block light rail on George Street?”

“Well, you have to consider his personal mind-set too. He knew that light rail in the CBD would anchor an entire system and the light rail solution would start to spread. It would grab funding, especially government funding, and there’s a limited amount of that. It’s just another blow to his motorway plans.

“Remember, this bloke is intimately associated with motorway building – he calls himself ‘the father of urban toll roads’ in Australia – and tollways are in trouble. The whole private tollway model was predicated on continuing abundance of oil and continuous growth in road traffic. They based all their financial models on that. Trouble is, traffic growth stalled in 2004 when petrol hit 90 cents a litre and it’s flatlined since then. Greiner and his mates are silly enough to think that if they can get a new multi-billion dollar tollroad built – something like the WestConnex proposal – traffic might just get a boost through the ‘induced traffic’ effect. It wouldn’t happen of course, because by the time they got the thing finished, we’d have had another decade of oil and gas decline, and of course the price at the pump will have soared.

“Petrol isn’t getting any cheaper, eh. And it goes up every time they try to reflate the economy.”

“But of course the private sector will want the government to take all the risk. They’ve had the PPP boys at Evans & Peck working on that angle for ages, if I recall rightly”, said Joadja.

“You do”, I replied,  “But I dunno how popular that’s going to be, even with a pro-big business Liberal Government. Look what’s happening in Brisbane: The $4.8 billion BrisConnections tollway, which was predicted to get 135,000 users a day on opening, is only managing 81,000 … and it’s toll-free at the moment! Imagine what’s going to happen when they start whacking motorists four or five dollars to drive through it. It’s only a matter of time before the thing goes into bankruptcy.”

“And they’re talking about WestConnex costing $10 – 13 billion. I can’t wait to see their ‘business plan’. When’s it due out?”

“Mid next year, according to Duncan Gay”.

• More Nick Possum at brushtail.com.au