Mini-budget brings eternal darkness to the land

BY MICHAEL GORMLY

NSW after the mini-budget resembles The Lord of the Rings minus the happy ending. Sauron has The Ring, or at least a AAA credit rating, and a bleak future of scorched earth, darkness and misery faces the oppressed people.

Colourful, yes, but accurate. Consider the environmental consequences alone of scrapping the north-west rail line and staying with coal-fired power. According to the government’s own State Plan, transport produces 14 per cent of our greenhouse pollution and power generation a massive 48 per cent.

With emissions trading to kick in by 2010, blind Freddy can see that will bleed dollars out of NSW for generations. You and your children will pay for it through power bills and bus fares.

But wait, it gets worse. Already the city is choked with lurching buses pouring through the CBD during peak hours. All the 400 series Strathfield buses now terminate at the Domain and exit in single file up Crown Street in Woolloomooloo which, last time I looked, is in the inner east, not an ideal place for westbound juggernauts.

Where will they terminate the extra fleets required to service the expanding McMansion lands of the north west ‘ Glebe’ Pyrmont’ Assuming of course they can find drivers for them in the first place.

The proposed CBD metro will initially run from Rozelle to Central, an easy walking or cycling trip. Sydney will then have possibly the dumbest transport grid in the world, with the monorail, light rail and the metro paralleling each other through Ultimo and Haymarket en route to a country train terminal in the south-west of the city, while most passengers need to head towards Circular Quay. That’s three different, incompatible non-connecting systems duplicating each other.

Even the axing of five grain freight lines in western NSW will impact on city residents. Apart from the extra pollution, switching grain transport to roads and trucks will make it more expensive. Expect the price of bread to climb again.

Then there is the new parking levy. Pyrmont consultant Peter Walsh now pays $950 a year tax on the parking spot under his office building on Wattle Street ‘ the same fee as a spot in Pitt St. The mini-budget jacks it up to a massive $2000.

“The irony is it will cost less to rent a car space from one of the local residents or use early-bird parking for those days when I am in the office,” he said.

While parking levies might fit well into a program to reduce car use, the backpedalling on public transport exposes them as a simple cash grab that will also be passed on to the rest of us through higher prices. And there is another inequity: If Mr Walsh’s business was on the west side of the street it would be exempt from the levy.

Land tax will increase to 2 percent on investment properties over $2.25 million. It is difficult to weep for people with that much wealth but most of this tax gets passed on to renters, slugging those least able to afford it.

While The Greens and others tout infrastructure bonds as the way out of this mess, Finance Minister Joe Tripodi seems stuck in a discredited 1980s style slash-and-burn mentality ‘ just as every other government is spending more to minimize the coming recession.

Frodo, where art thou’