Political meddling with infrastructure planning often leaves the experts without a seat at the table when it comes to prioritising key projects, RMIT research fellow Crystal Legacy says.
Legacy, who gave her thoughts to University of Western Sydney lecturer for urban studies Dallas Rodgers on The Conversation’s ‘Speaking with…’ podcast last week, believes projects like Melbourne’s canned East West Link toll road are the product of opaque politics, when projects should instead come from a broader range of decision makers
“There is an urgent need to build more transport infrastructure,” Legacy said in the podcast released on August 28. “Cities are growing, they’re expanding, and the population is certainly rising.
“The question is what kind of infrastructure we should be investing in, and that’s a debate that we’ve seen certainly in Sydney and Melbourne, but also in Perth and in other cities around Australia.
“Often it gets framed as ‘roads vs. rail’, but I like to encourage others to think of it as economic infrastructure vs. social infrastructure. We tend to focus on the economic outcomes and benefits of transport infrastructure, and we don’t always think carefully and clearly about the social benefits as well.”
The focus on economic outcomes – job creation, for instance – is often politically motivated, Legacy says.
“We don’t always think about what are the other areas that we should be prioritising in value as well.
“Should we just be investing in a project to create jobs? Should we be thinking about how we can make that infrastructure works for us in other ways?
“That’s where planning plays a huge role.”
Unfortunately, planning experts are unable to play their huge role when it comes to making a final decision, Legacy explains.
“Funding is limited and usually we only involve in one big piece of urban transport infrastructure, and that’s where the question becomes a political one,” she says.
Legacy says the East West Link toll road in Melbourne, which was cancelled by the Andrews government earlier this year, is a prime example of this mechanism.
“[Victoria] got a change of government in 2010. At that point in time there was a lot of interest in building public transport, but as the government settled in we saw the East West Link trickle up to the surface as the state’s number one priority.
“On top of that, the cost-benefit analysis and the business case were quite opaque… The government was really keen on pushing the contract signing through before the state election in 2014, and as you can imagine that raised some eyebrows about the democratic process, and the way in which the community and other stakeholder groups should be engaging with transport decision making.
“The manner in which they were pushing it through clearly demonstrated they were underpinning this project some political motivations.”
Legacy says project prioritisation often “occurs outside of the strategic planning process” … “and usually involves people in treasury – politicians – who will make a decision based on a political mandate that they may have been elected on, but as we saw in Victoria, that’s not necessarily the case either.
“I think the key issue for transport infrastructure at the moment is one of governance,” she concludes.
“It’s one of who is making decisions, who is setting priorities, who is sitting at the table, and who is being excluded from that table.”