It was the stupidest day in this election campaign. This is why the airport rail is a mess

When you have spent two years reading florid descriptions about gangsters and bikies and union thugs running amok on Big Build sites, this week’s allegations that a group of browbeaten bureaucrats doctored cost estimates on the airport rail project might sound like small beer.

What’s a bit of wayward pencil pushing compared to strippers in the smoko room, crooks selling drugs out of government-funded workplaces and the adventures of everyone’s favourite convicted killer turned union health and safety rep, Jonny “Two Guns” Walker?

They are both symptoms of a much bigger disease – the politics-first approach to major infrastructure that relegates the public justification for spending multiples of billions of taxpayer dollars below whatever benefits these projects might deliver at the next election.

This is a disease which, over the sequence of four elections, has corrupted the Victorian Labor Party, wrecked the state’s finances, bequeathed a massive debt to future generations and bastardised how we select, plan for and build major projects.

It is a disease the Kourakis royal commission has now been asked to treat, as it examines lurid tales from criminally infiltrated building sites and public servants who, in confidential submissions revealed by this masthead, allege they were bullied and coerced to make their advice fit the government’s political objectives.

Just don’t assume, for a minute, that this state election offers a cure.

If the polls are right, Victoria will have a new government after November 28 and the Labor Party will enter a period of much-needed introspection to work out what they stand for, whose interests they serve and where they lost their way.

But, as Victoria turns its lonely eyes to Jess Wilson (apologies to Messrs Simon and Garfunkel), the Liberal Party is already showing signs of the same affliction.

The stupidest day so far in this election campaign was Wednesday, September 30. Premier Ben Carroll and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stood together in the Tottenham rail yards to announce the construction of the Sunshine to Keilor East railway, a $4 billion contrivance to secure more votes in the premier’s electorate.

No sooner had rail planners and engineers familiar with this part of the airport rail project stopped rolling their eyes, the opposition leader posted her own video promising – you guessed it – to build a new train station in Keilor East.

Wilson is now committed to the same folly as Carroll. “The route is the route,” she declared this week.

The route is also rooted.

People who really know this stuff – professional planners and engineers and various experts who have spent decades sweating over the details of major transport projects – say there are three big problems with the version of the airport rail link on which the Victorian and federal governments have settled.

The first is the intention to run airport trains through the Metro Tunnel.

The fine print of the Melbourne Metro business case shows that once we electrify the Melton and Wyndham Vale lines and include some of Australia’s fastest-growing suburbs in the metropolitan rail system, there won’t be any room left in the tunnel for airport trains.

Neither Albanese nor Carroll were able to say, when questioned about this on the day of their announcement about Keilor East station, how the airport trains would get to the city. No one from the state government has explained how $4.1 billion worth of signalling upgrades and grade separations at Sunshine station – a genuinely bizarre project now known as MARL (Melbourne Airport Rail Link) stage 1 – will actually increase rail capacity between Sunshine and the CBD.

Spoiler alert: it won’t.

The second is the estimated $1.5 billion to $2 billion cost that building a new station at Keilor East will add to the MARL project and the impact that slower travel times will have on the patronage of the new line by international and interstate visitors which, in turn, will reduce the financial return to the state.

The government claims a trip from Melbourne Airport to Town Hall Station will take 29 minutes. One source with intimate knowledge of the government’s MARL plans, but unauthorised to discuss them publicly, says that once trains stop at Keilor East, the trip will be closer to 40 minutes.

That is 10 minutes slower than the SkyBus.

The third problem is that the most crucial part of the MARL, the section that takes passengers to and from the airport terminals, remains on the government’s to-do list. Next time you are driving along Naarm Way, the elevated road that takes you from the freeway to the main domestic and international terminals, look out your window and try to imagine how a train line fits into the picture.

This is not an argument to abandon airport rail.

Melbourne needs more public transport to the airport. But if Jess Wilson is serious about repairing Victoria’s finances and eventually paying down the state’s record net debt, she needs to straighten out how we build big things in this state.

The first step is to strip electoral politics out of major project decisions. She should start by dumping her knee-jerk promise to build a new train station in Keilor East.

The government forecasts that by 2038, more people will fly in and out of Melbourne Airport than Sydney’s Kingsford Smith, New York’s JFK or Singapore’s Changi airports. The purpose of the MARL is to move those people to and from the city as efficiently as possible – not featherbed the vote in Niddrie.

If the Kourakis royal commission is eventually satisfied that all the numbers in the MARL business plan stack up and the Coalition is convinced, upon coming to power, that an airport train line with stops at Sunshine and Keilor East is the best way of doing this, then by all means, stick with the plan.

In the meantime, pilots landing at Tullamarine had better watch out for flying pigs.

Chip Le Grand is state political editor.

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