Several bridges have had to be demolished and rebuilt along the Inland Rail route. Photo: Inland Rail/Facebook.
The federal Labor Government has been accused of abandoning regional communities after ditching the Inland Rail vision of a freight line from Melbourne and Brisbane by halting it at Parkes.
But the uncomfortable truth is Labor had little choice.
By the time it inherited the project, Inland Rail had already become a runaway train – burdened by the wrong route, cost blowouts and an incomplete project plan destined to fail before the first sleeper was laid.
This was a truly bipartisan bungle that has cost taxpayers billions and again exposed a harsh reality: bureaucrats just can’t do nation-building projects.
The original Inland Rail vision was simple and sensible: move freight between Melbourne and Brisbane faster and cheaper, help farmers and manufacturers get goods to capital cities, and take thousands of trucks off our congested highways.
The TV comedy Utopia wrote the script to this drama back in 2014.
In one memorable episode, Rob Sitch’s fictional Nation Building Authority pitches a perfectly sensible Melbourne to Brisbane freight rail project through regional Australia. He explains it stacks up economically, but the politicians are not impressed. Freight trains through sparsely populated rural areas just aren’t sexy. What they really want is something faster, shinier and politically exciting – so the idea gradually morphs into a plan for high-speed passenger rail connecting Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
“I don’t want to build it, I just want to launch it,” Kitty Flanagan’s character famously said.
Art turned into reality the following year when Brisbane-based private consortium National Trunk Rail proposed a $13 billion Melbourne-to-Brisbane freight line via Shepparton, Tocumwal and Narrandera.
This was a flatter alignment that avoided difficult terrain and major urban disruption while passing directly through some of the nation’s richest food-producing regions – making it accessible to producers across the Riverina.
But the Coalition backed the government-owned Australian Rail Track Corporation’s supposedly cheaper eastern route through the larger population centres of Albury and Wagga. At the time, the line was expected to cost about $10 billion.
That figure now looks more comical than any scene from Utopia.
Today, the cost estimate has exploded to more than $45 billion. It was supposed to be finished by next year, yet not a single track has been laid in Queensland – the most critical section of the route.
Perhaps the biggest irony is that Inland Rail was marketed as a way to help local producers reach global export markets, yet the ATRC line had no plan to reach a port at either end. Rob Sitch couldn’t have dreamt of that script.
An independent review of Inland Rail, led by Dr Kerry Schott, was scathing.
Her report found ARTC suffered from weak governance, poor risk management and unreliable cost and schedule reporting. She concluded that the organisation lacked adequate skills and oversight and failed to resolve key problems that should have been addressed long before billions were committed.
None of this should have surprised anyone.
Former National Trunk Rail chairman Martin Albrecht warned years ago that the ARTC plan would become “the NBN all over again” – a government-run project sold as cheap before becoming vastly more expensive.
The Wagga alignment also brought its own costly headaches – bridge demolitions, traffic disruption and complicated construction through the centre of town – while bypassing much of the Riverina food bowl that Inland Rail was supposedly designed to serve in the first place.
Of course, governments never build these projects alone.
Large infrastructure projects attract armies of consultants, lawyers, planners and contractors, all clipping tickets along the way. Bureaucracies, lacking commercial discipline and often desperate to protect political timetables, become easy prey.
The result is a familiar Australian ritual – lowball the cost, announce the project with fanfare, then return years later asking taxpayers for billions more.
Did anyone seriously expect this federal government to keep spending an infinite amount on the Queensland leg of a project that won’t pass through any Labor seats?
So yes, Labor has pulled the handbrake.
But the Coalition had already driven the train off the track.
Australians are left with a massive bill, while nobody in power has been held to account.
In the end, both sides of politics have made Utopia look less like satire and more like a documentary.
Original Article published by Oliver Jacques on Region Canberra.
