Yesterday in State Parliament, the Victorian Liberal Party and Greens voted 22 to 18 to block planning changes needed to construct the West Gate Tunnel. From The ABC:
Construction on the multi-billion-dollar West Gate Tunnel project is set to grind to a halt after being blocked by the Victorian Parliament’s Upper House when the State Opposition worked with the Greens to revoke planning approval…
The Coalition and the Greens today voted 22 to 18 to block planning changes needed for the project.
Roads Minister Luke Donnellan said that meant work had to stop, but it may start again as soon as Thursday when the Government re-gazettes the planning approvals.
“I can assure you we have a way through. We will reintroduce the planning scheme again. We will gazette it again and this project will continue,” he said.
“I’ve indicated we have pathways through and we will assess those when we need to assess them. In many ways it’s the actions taken by the Upper House which will dictate which pathways we [actually use].”
Once those changes were gazetted, the Upper House could simply revoke them again.
But the Opposition’s David Davis would not say whether the Coalition would put up another revocation motion.
“We can’t control what the Government does now. But what is clear is that this project is not in the community interest,” he said.
Greens MP Sam Hibbins said they would revoke planning approvals again if the Government did not make significant changes.
“We’re opposed to the West Gate Tunnel. And if the Government is just going to bowl up the exact same project, well, of course we’re going to oppose it,” he said.
This has shades of the farcical $17 billion East-West Link Project, whose contract was signed by the former Liberal Government without undertaking and business case and then scuttled by the incoming Labor Government at a $642 million net cost to taxpayers.
Back in August, it was revealed that an expert was cut for voicing concerns about the efficacy of the project to Victorian Treasurer, Tim (“Ponzi”) Pallas.
In September it was revealed that the Andrews Labor Government was trying to keep Victorians in the dark about the West Gate Tunnel Project by keeping an expert’s report critical of the modelling confidential.
In November, despite the major misgivings mentioned above, the Andrews Labor Government approved the West Gate Tunnel project. Then in December it was revealed that the cost of the West Gate Tunnel project has blown out by more than $1 billion to $6.7 billion, with Transurban contributing $4.4 billion towards the cost, but in exchange motorists will have to pay additional tolls on CityLink until 2045 estimated at $15 billion:
Former premier Jeff Kennett criticised the deal as “absurd” and slammed the government for forging ahead with Transurban despite never putting the $6.7bn deal to tender.
“Transurban is a very good company and very, very clever, but they’ve clearly got the government in their pocket,” Mr Kennett said…
I have argued repeatedly that one of the key reasons why Australia’s high population growth (immigration) is lowering the living standards of existing residents is because of the strain that it places on infrastructure, which inevitably leads to more congestion on roads, public transport, as well as more expensive housing.
Basic math (and commonsense) suggests that if you double the nation’s population, you need to at least double the stock of infrastructure to ensure that living standards are not eroded (other things equal).
And if you don’t build-out the infrastructure efficiently to match the population influx, then productivity and ergo living standards will be reduced.
In practice, however, the solution is not that simple. In already built-out cities like Sydney and Melbourne, which also happen to be the major magnets for new migrants, the cost of retrofitting new infrastructure to accommodate greater population densities can become prohibitively expensive because of the need for land buy-backs, tunneling, as well as disruptions to existing infrastructure – basic ‘dis-economies of scale’.
Indeed, the PC’s Shifting the Dial: 5 year productivity review, released in October, explicitly noted that infrastructure costs will inevitably balloon due to our cities’ rapidly growing populations:
Growing populations will place pressure on already strained transport systems… Yet available choices for new investments are constrained by the increasingly limited availability of unutilised land. Costs of new transport structures have risen accordingly, with new developments (for example WestConnex) requiring land reclamation, costly compensation arrangements, or otherwise more expensive alternatives (such as tunnels).
The $5.5 billion West Gate Tunnel project is a textbook example of the dis-economies of scale so often attached to modern Australian infrastructure ‘solutions’.
