“While the Morrison-Joyce government is focused on picking fights with Victorians, an Albanese Labor government will partner with the state to build the projects that matter,” federal opposition infrastructure spokeswoman Catherine King said.
The Victorian government now wants the federal government to contribute an additional $9.3 billion towards the Rail Loop’s first stage. However, infrastructure experts want the Albanese Government to first submit the project to Infrastructure Australia for evaluation before committing additional funding:
Labor’s largest pre-election infrastructure pledge – is well short of the $11.5 billion Victoria wants from its federal colleagues to build the loop’s first eastern leg…
The first stage connecting Cheltenham to Box Hill is set to open by 2035 and cost between $30 billion and $34.5 billion…
“The thing about the Suburban Rail Loop is that project hasn’t been through Infrastructure Australia,” said Marion Terrill, director of the Grattan Institute’s Transport and Cities program.
“The pressure will be on not to put any more money into the Suburban Rail Loop unless and until it has had a positive assessment from Infrastructure Australia. I would assume that is some way off still”…
“What’s expected at a federal level is to avoid many of the issues we’ve seen – pork barrelling and [what] some would allege is corrupt practice – over the past decade,” [Jago Dodson, professor of urban policy and director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University] said. “If federal Labor is true to the framework it established … it will subject the Suburban Rail Loop to full evaluation and public reporting by Infrastructure Australia before committing funds”…
An Age investigation revealed last August how the loop was conceived in a secretive and questionable process led by consultants at PwC, which shut out most of the state’s cabinet and the then-head of the Transport Department.
This entire project was back-to-front to begin with and is a textbook example of everything that is wrong with infrastructure provision in this country.
Standard due process would have required a proper cost-benefit analysis to have been undertaken before the project was approved and then announced. Instead, the project was announced first to give the Labor Government a shock-and-awe ‘announceable’ in the run-up to the last State Election amid voter concerns about excessive population growth, as well as giving the appearance that the Government had the situation under control.
This project was never submitted for assessment by Infrastructure Australia nor Infrastructure Victoria. There was no business case conducted before its announcement. And Victoria’s transport department wasn’t even told about the plan for fear that it would attempt to block the project from within government.
Then the project received a rubbery ‘benefit-to-cost ratio’ that was produced years later based on creative accounting to inflate the project’s worth.
No wonder the Suburban Rail Loop has been labelled “the worst transport project Melbourne has ever seen”.
The suburban rail loop also highlights another hidden cost of mass immigration. The project has been created to ameliorate the impact of Melbourne nearly doubling in size to “a population of nine million by 2056, the size of London today”, according to Transport Minister Jacinta Allan – something few Melburnians actually want.
Anthony Albanese must follow his own spin and “invest in projects that matter”. Because the Suburban Rail Loop is a monumental waste of taxpayers money and arguably Australia’s biggest ever infrastructure ‘white elephant’.
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also Chief Economist and co-founder of MacroBusiness.
Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.
Latest posts by Unconventional Economist
(see all) 
