2009 Budget winners & losers

By Mark Carter

With the renewed focus on infrastructure central to the concept of ‘Nation Building’ as a partial solution to the fallout to current economic conditions, rail has already been the beneficiary of some significant funding commitments from the Federal Government’s economic stimulus packages.
Much of this funding has been targeted at the interstate and Hunter Valley networks, and while ‘enough is never enough’ it was always going to be hard to justify additional interstate spending in this budget.
So it was nice to see urban rail as a surprise winner when it came to the column labelled ‘infrastructure’ this year - especially when it was on a scale never seen before.
While in the past the odd crumb of Federal funding has been tossed in the general direction of urban rail projects, it has traditionally been seen as a State funding issue. A mantra religiously adhered to by the previous Federal administration.
As has been frequently highlighted in Rail Express, most of our urban rail networks have been creaking under the strain of increased passenger numbers in recent years, most noticeably in Melbourne and Brisbane.
On the other hand, sensible investment in new urban rail projects such as the Mandurah extension in Western Australia has been a huge success and has shown what can be done.
While the world comes to grips with its economic malaise, passenger numbers on our urban rail networks are likely to stabilise or even drop, but history tells us that this is only likely to be a short term phenomenon.
So it was pleasing to see a bit of vision with more than $4.6 billion in budget funding committed to the planning, development and construction of nine metropolitan rail projects in Adelaide, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney.
The rationale behind this investment appears to be concerns regarding the high cost of congestion in our major cities. The Government says the cost of doing nothing would see a doubling of our road congestion costs to around $20 billion per annum by 2020.
Melbourne is the big funding winner with a $3.2 billion contribution towards the Regional Rail Express project to provide a 40 kilometre dual track link from West Werribee to central Melbourne via Sunshine that will segregate V/Line regional rail services from metropolitan rail services and vice versa, speeding up services and providing much needed extra capacity.
South Australia comes a distant second, but even so investment of over $500 million will see electrification and gauge standardisation of the State’s busiest commuter line to Gawler brought forward by several years, and construction of the long anticipated 5.5 kilometre extension from Noarlunga to Seaford.
The Melbourne to Brisbane Inland Route could be seen to be the biggest budget loser, although the reality is that it was never really in the running.
Released a week before the budget, the first Working Papers from the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC) study into the inland proposal clearly spelt out that under current scenarios it could not be considered financially viable.
Surprisingly in the days after this there were still major headlines claiming the project would be a major budget winner.
Releasing the Working Papers, ARTC has pointed out that the assessment of the proposed railway’s financial and economic performance is at an early stage.
Despite the headline grabbing ‘nation building’ nature any funding would have provided, in light of the release of the Working Papers it would have been foolhardy for the Government to commit at this stage.
Conversely it could be argued that time is running out to make a start on this project.
Some critics are pointing out that every instance of Government largesse directed at the existing Melbourne-Sydney-Brisbane coastal route, such as the recently announced $840 million funding for the first stage of a North Sydney Freight route, weakens the case for investment in the Inland Route.
We can congratulate Rudd and Co and their unprecedented commitment to urban rail and the fact that a number of proposed high profile road projects were overlooked in favour of rail.
But it is worth remembering that over the next five to six years the Government is planning on investing $27.7 billion in road projects from the Building Australia Fund and Nation Building Program, hitting $5 billion in 2013-14.

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