The popular view of infrastructure is that we don’t have nearly enough of the stuff, so the more we spend the better for the economy. The sad reality is that every year huge amounts of taxpayers’ money are wasted on infrastructure – and much of the damage is begun in election campaigns.
This is not to deny that well-chosen and executed infrastructure projects contribute significantly to improving the productivity of the economy – its ability to produce more goods and services per unit of inputs of economic resources.
It may even be true that we have a backlog of projects we should be getting on with. But that doesn’t mean we’re not wasting a shedload of money – mainly by building the wrong things in the wrong places.
Sadly, in our messy world, shortages of infrastructure can exist side by side with waste and extravagance. The more money we waste, the bigger the shortages.
Why does this happen? Often because good economics gets trumped by expedient politics. Often what’s good economics lacks sex appeal – spending enough each year to ensure roads and rail lines are well maintained, for instance – whereas politicians are irresistibly attracted to projects that are new, flashy and appeal to the unthinking (radio shock jocks, for example) as just what they think we need.
And because political parties mostly want to use the announcement of new spending projects to win voters’ approval in those electorates they might lose or could win.
That’s why election campaigns are when the seeds of later waste are sown. You think of something that will sound nice, pick a price tag that sounds big but not too big, travel to the right town, don hi-vis jacket and hard hat, wait till the media cameras arrive, make the grand promise – and then wait till you’re elected or re-elected to get the bureaucrats to "do the paperwork" – estimate how much it really will cost and work up some sort of "business case" showing the project’s benefits will exceed its costs.
This, of course, is just the opposite of how you’d go about ensuring every dollar spent was well-spent. Someone suggests a project, you put it to the test. What exactly is the problem you’re trying to solve? How does it rank in importance against all our other problems?
The particular project you’re examining is probably just one way of solving the nominated problem. What are the other options? You compare the various options by making the best measurement you can of each one’s costs and expected benefits to the community, then pick the option where the benefits most exceed the costs. (There may well be some unquantifiable considerations that also need to be taken into account.)
By this point you ought to have a well-informed estimate of the chosen project’s monetary cost. That estimate should allow for the likelihood that not everything will run according to plan.
According to Hugh Batrouney, then of the Grattan Institute, last year the federal government proposed rail links to the (future) Western Sydney airport and to Tullamarine airport. (Note the symmetry. If Sydney’s getting something, better have something similar for Melbourne.)
At the time of announcement, neither project had a developed business case. But the opposition was quick to support the government’s proposal.
Trouble is, a government study found that Western Sydney won’t need a rail link until 2036 at the earliest. In the case of Melbourne’s rail link, the project’s route hasn’t been resolved, let alone its costs, ticket pricing structure or potential benefits.
And Infrastructure Victoria said upgrading airport bus services should be investigated before spending on a rail link – which, in any case, would be much more expensive and couldn’t be delivered for at least 15 years.
Grattan’s healthcare expert, Dr Stephen Duckett, says that when federal politicians promise to build new hospitals in particular places – as both sides have done in this campaign – they interfere with the state governments’ responsibility to plan where the next hospital development should be, so as to ensure access to public hospitals is adequate throughout the state.
Next, take the plan announced in this year’s budget for a national “commuter car park fund” costing $500 million over 10 years, intended to make it easier for people in the suburbs to drive to their local train station.
A group of transport and urban planning experts from the University of Melbourne has written on The Conversation website that half a bil may sound like a lot, but it probably buys only about 30,000 new parking spaces, serving maybe 45,000 extra commuters. That’s just 4 per cent of the Australians who travel to work by public transport.
And, they note, there’s no guarantee the extra parkers would be people who’d no longer go to work by car. Studies suggest a lot of them would be people who formerly walked, cycled or bussed to a different station (where the parking spots are always taken).
The experts suggest it might be better to spend the $500 million on more frequent bus services to stations, and use the car parks for more valuable purposes.
Marion Terrill, Grattan’s transport infrastructure expert, says Labor’s most important promises aren’t the sexy stuff about electric vehicles, but one to ensure Infrastructure Australia assesses projects before the decision to invest in them, and to make the assessed business cases public. Doesn’t quite fit with some of Labor’s latest project promises, however.
"It would be a significant improvement if whichever party wins government next month were to commit to, and follow through on, careful assessment of transport gaps and problems, consideration of the various feasible solutions, and rigorous evaluation of the preferred approach," she concludes.
"And it’s not enough just to do this; it should be done in public." Amen to that.
