Make up your mind, Premier
The Age
Saturday March 26, 2011
EVERY new government strives to distinguish its agenda from its predecessor's, and the easiest way of doing so is to repudiate one or more of the major projects it has inherited. The easiest course, however, is not necessarily the wisest a point that unfortunately seems lost on the Baillieu government. Four months after ending Labor's 11-year reign, the Coalition still cannot decide whether to proceed with several of the big-ticket items associated with the Brumby years: the $5 billion regional rail link, the $1.3 billon myki public-transport ticket system, the $360 million HealthSmart IT system for public hospitals and the $300 million wholesale fruit and vegetable market being built at Epping all have a question mark over their futures. A $4 million study of traffic congestion in Hoddle Street has been shelved, and the $700 million pipeline linking Melbourne's water supply to the Goulburn River is effectively in mothballs, to be used only in emergencies.These projects are not all of a kind, and the arguments that may be made for and against sticking with each of them differ. The government's hesitancy over all of them, however, suggests that it is keener to find instances of Labor profligacy that will lay the ground for an austere budget in May than it is to tackle the challenges of renewing Victoria's infrastructure and improving the provision of community services. That is a disturbing trend so early in a government's first term, especially since public anger at neglect of community services is what propelled the Coalition into office.Mothballing of the north-south pipeline is the easiest decision for the government to defend: the pipeline was one of the most fiercely contested of the Brumby government's initiatives, becoming an election issue for the Coalition, and in any case the end of the drought has reduced the need it was intended to alleviate. The government can plausibly argue, too, that the rail line it plans to build to Doncaster a welcome and long-overdue extension of Melbourne's network will do more to ease traffic congestion in Hoddle Street than anything the cancelled study might have come up with. Plugging the pipeline and a commitment to build the rail line are at least positive decisions: they reveal the government's thinking, whereas its indecision on the other projects does not. What would be gained by walking away now from the new wholesale market? The costs have blown out, but the cost of abandoning the project, on which construction is already advanced, might well prove even greater, and the defects of the existing Footscray market would remain. As this newspaper has argued before, similar considerations also apply to myki, which is now free of most of the glitches that hampered its introduction. And, most serious of all, if the regional rail link is abandoned regional rail services will continue to depend on metropolitan tracks as they approach Melbourne, to the detriment of both systems. If the government has better alternatives to all these projects, it should say so.As planning academic Alan Marsh has argued, it is in the nature of major projects that they are rarely accomplished within a single term of government. No government can responsibly take a "ground zero" approach to the projects of its predecessors or the reliability of their advisers, but the Baillieu government seems inclined to do just that.
© 2011 The Age