‘Flying blind’: why Labor ditched the inland rail route
Besieged internal railway The project was once described as derailed from the start.
The cost of the freight rail route between Melbourne and Brisbane has risen to $45.6 billion by 2025, almost 10 times the original investment estimated at $4.7 billion in 2015.
But that eye-watering figure, which prompted the federal Labor government to cancel the route north of Parkes in central NSW, was only a modest estimate of the increased cost, a Senate estimates hearing was told.
Infrastructure department secretary Jim Betts tabled the issue on Monday independent analysis This informed the government’s decision to drastically shorten the original route.
The biggest sticking points identified in consultant ACIL Allen’s report, which itself cost $1.87 million, were several pending approvals for the Queensland route.
“$45.6 billion is the lowest estimate,” Mr Betts told the hearing in Canberra.
“(This) is based on some reasonably optimistic assumptions, for example that work will start in 2025, but that is not explicitly included in some of the core packages.”
He said the government was “flying blind” on route planning in Queensland and it could be subject to further approval and consent conditions.
Environmental approval, land acquisition, delayed approvals, community pushback, and “unexpected technical issues” were identified as some of the project’s top risks.
Mr Betts said the northern corridor had been “protected” to allow any future government to revisit the project.
Conducting the analysis was a company’s recommendation. 2023 reviewHe revealed that construction began “somewhat surprisingly” without knowing where the route would start and end.
followed by a 2021 Senate reportInland Rail, as it was called: went off the rails from the start, raising fundamental questions about the project’s business case and cost.
Mr Betts said the government decided it would be wiser to develop the existing government-owned Australian Rail Line Corporation network, which spans more than 9,600km across five states.
Over the past five years the network has experienced 200 days of weather-related closures, including a 14-day closure of a key corridor between WA and the rest of the country in January.
“It has been well documented that there have been some significant challenges to this network in recent times, with prolonged outages as a result of historic underinvestment,” Mr Betts said.
“What the industry is telling us is that the priority is to invest in the integrity of the existing network.”
The scrapping of the entire inland railway project is likely to be decisive in regional and rural Senate predictions, which are scheduled to continue until Thursday.
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