Hang on, Canberra, we could be headed for another light rail election

Well Russell Tibballs, you have got me started again. I am still waiting on opposition Transport spokesman Mark Parton to release his party’s transport plans. Labor and the Greens have provided voters (over the past three elections) a vision for the future of public transport in Canberra and the Canberra Liberals have failed to do so. This is despite all of the whingeing and criticisms the government has endured. Mr Bushell promised us a major announcement from Mr Parton on his party’s transport plans a couple of weeks ago. The Queen’s death stymied the announcement and Mr Parton took a break, choofing off to WA to see his mum. Mr Parton and the Canberra Liberals have had ample opportunity to provide the party’s transport plans into the future. Where are they and why isn’t the media pursuing this?

Owning a car is about $10000 pa according to savings.com.au. So if 25,000 people stop owning cars that is probably $150,000,000 (assume they still spend $4000 pa to get around). that these people can spend elsewhere. Ideally, in a city, you shouldn’t need a car. Cars are a luxury and a pain. With parking – I currently pay at least $11 per day if I don’t need to go anywhere which I often do.

Canberra was designed with a rail system. It should have one.

More power to Parton. You sometimes need a person without a filter to say the emperor has no clothes.

Continuing with the light rail could just mean falling prey to the sunk costs fallacy. Why bang our heads against the fiscal wall? Why continue to pay the rates (and speeding fines) to finance this disaster? It may be better for Canberra in the long run to abandon the whole project, sell as much of the infrastructure off and move to electric buses.

Earlier this week, we had the Chalmers-Gallagher double act foreshadowing a “conversation” (such a wonderfully threatening euphemism) with the Australian people about the pressures on the federal budget – with the fairly obvious implication that there will be higher taxes and fewer lurks, perks and rorts (of the LNP variety, anyway) at the federal level in coming years.

Just like the federal budget, the ACT budget is under serious medium and longer term pressure due to the costs of major programs such as health rising at a faster rate than revenues can realistically be expected to rise.

The problem for the ACT is that we have already had our budget “conversation”. That happened a decade ago, when the rates/stamp duty trade-off was lifted from the Henry Report as a cunning means of locking in windfall stamp duty revenues in the ACT budget. All of that money has been spent and committed, we now have a large debt to service in a world where super-low interest rates are looking like a thing of the past, and the thought of taxes ratcheting substantially higher than currently projected is more than many Canberra households and businesses could bear.

With this reality as a background, the ACT Liberals should have a “conversation” with Canberrans about choices and the financial costs of those choices – not just the claimed benefits. Any alternative to the government’s light rail plans should be framed in that way, as should any thought of supporting a stadium/convention centre as a spending alternative to those plans.

I should like to see light rail press ahead with all speed, even though I (like Parton) live in the southern Tuggeranong. It will have to be done and it were better done sooner than later. Moreover, I’d like to see a spur to the airport through the Defence precinct built soon.

The ACT Government could follow the example of Brisbane, which has taken delivery of their first battery powered double articulated bus. With streamlined covers over the wheels, they look like trams. But the battery busses don’t need rails, or overhead wires, able to run on existing roads, and bridges.

The light rail has only won elections because the Labor/Greens government ran and is still running a very sophisticated advertising campaign – at taxpayers’ expense, of course. This includes never coming clean on the costs – while draining the budgets of and running down essential public services – and using half-truths if not outright false statements in their promotional literature. For instance, it is claimed that “The ACT Government is building light rail to Woden to help make Canberra a more connected, sustainable, and vibrant city.” Anybody using public transport knows that it is not the light rail but the rapid buses that connect the various parts of Canberra, where you can remain on the same seat travelling from Tuggeranong via Woden, Civic and Canberra University to Belconnen. Even if the light rail were to get to Tuggeranong and Belconnen one day, taking twice as long as rapid buses, who would want to use it? And e-buses are more sustainable than the light rail, for they don’t create the massive amounts of C02 produced on laying the tracks and shipping in trams from half-way around the world. The truth is that light rail is the tool for urban densification – an absurd policy at a time when the greatest threat to city dwellers already now and increasingly in the years to come is the Urban Heat Island effect, claiming lives far beyond what is reported, as the CSIRO in its recent report “Our Future World” has pointed out.