Light rail challenge another reason the Feds need to take more of the ACT's infrastructure burden

“Land is the currency that keeps the ACT afloat”? Indeed exorbitant taxing of land explains why ACT became the most expensive place to live. Barr and Ratteburry have created a generation of renters who can never afford buying an empty block of land from the Greens/Labor government let alone a house.

Over budget and still not completed. A thought bubble becomes a policy, becomes a mess. How many times does this ALP/Green coalition government get to do this? Unfortunately because of the predominantly Public Service Electorate of Canberra they won’t ever be held to account. But as for bailing them out……Yeh, Nah, think not.

Getting the tracks to Adelaide Avenue is only the start of the problem. That central strip is prone to waterlogging so there will be lot of drainage / stabilisation work to be done before tracks can be laid to Woden. Next problem: most people are not going to walk across to the middle of Adelaide Avenue to catch the tram. They’ll go to Woden Interchange. By bus …

The ACT Labor/Green Government has had more than ten years since it first announced the proposed Canberra wide Light Rail network. In all that time they have still not come up with a realistic and practical way for getting from Commonwealth Avenue onto Adelaide Avenue and on to Woden.
You would think that any reasonable politician would have insisted that those details would have been worked out before even thinking of building stage 2A.

Well written!

So Ian Bushnell wants all Australian taxpayers to subsidise the poor planning and political decisions of local politicians.

But of course, he doesn’t want the ACT Government to cede any of the responsibility for the making of those decisions in the first place.

Makes sense.

The ACT Government has massively increased its revenue over the last decade, so the idea that the money isn’t there is laughable. Other taxpayers shouldn’t be conscripted to subsidise wasteful spending on unviable projects, no matter where they are.

Stop voting for the clown show!!!!

Dream on.

Aside from the then fashionable concepts of regionalisation and devolution, the primary motivation for ACT self-government was to save costs for the federal budget.

Those were times of real fiscal restraint and cut-backs, so the search for savings was constant, and there was an added factor – federal ministers were thoroughly fed up with dealing with the demands of Canberrans for services and facilities which were better than in other parts of the country (including in the electorates represented by many of the ministers in that government). The latter point would be equally relevant to many ministers in the current government.

It is almost certainly the case that the ACT is fiscally unsustainable, and that was probably always the case – certainly once the relative austerity of the era in which it was created was discarded, and replaced with an entitled attitude of puffed-up grandiosity and extravagance which is now too often on display.

For the obvious reason that the ACT is a reliable provider of left-of-centre MPs and Senators in an increasingly tightly-contested parliament, federal Labor will want to keep the little ACT sideshow rolling on for as long as possible, and the federal Coalition would be correspondingly reluctant to take the otherwise logical step of reducing the ACT to the Parliamentary Triangle and thus injecting a few hundred thousand lefties into the NSW electorate – but sooner or later, something serious will have to be done.

In the meantime, look forward to an ever-higher taxation burden and stretched services and facilities.

Another reason the Commonwealth should give greater assistance to the ACT is that prior to self-government the public transport system was very much neglected due to the then prevailing cult of the motor car. Also, because Canberra is relatively young, unlike the other major cities, we don’t even have the legacy train systems from the era before the car.

Thanks to Hawke and Keating, the feds abdicated their responsibility for manging and paying for our Capital in 1988 despite a no vote from the residents and handed it over to a bunch of amateur politicians, developers and real estate agents to create a concrete jungle off apartments. They should take it back as it is their responsibility. The tram is a very expensive folly in a city never designed for it.