Back in May, the ACT Labor Government signed the $710 million contract to build a 12-kilometre light rail line connecting Gungahlin in the north and Civic, thus locking taxpayers into paying for the project.
In June, the ACT Auditor-General released a damning assessment of ACT Light Rail Project, claiming that the cost-benefit analysis used to support the Project was chock full of erroneous assumptions and spurious benefit inclusions, and is unlikely to provide net benefits to Canberra residents.
This followed damning assessments by the Productivity Commission and the Grattan Institute, which both found that investing in bus rapid transit could have delivered the same benefits but at around half the taxpayer cost.
Now it has been discovered that an internal report delivered to government in 2013 conceded that the Light Rail Project does not stack up against rapid buses. From The Canberra Times:
“The difficulty with framing [light rail] as a transport project is that a relatively lower cost alternative is readily identifiable, that is bus rapid transit,” the paper, released after a freedom of information request, says.
“The project needs to be viewed differently – as an integrated land use, transport and planning policy project”…
Once light rail was “redefined” as about urban development and the economy, the government could pay for it through “value capture” – clawing back some of the benefits that would flow to developers and property owners on each side of the line through taxes and rates.
Counting those wider benefits turns a project of marginal benefit in transport terms into one the report said could deliver benefits in the order of three to four times the costs…
The government refused to release the same document after an FOI request almost two years ago.
Including wider land-use and planning “benefits” in the cost-benefit analysis is unquestionably dodgy as they would arise by changing the ACT’s planning framework to ensure higher density along the proposed line (at the expense of development and rates raised in other areas). Moreover, these “benefits” actually have little to do with the Light Rail Project itself and could just as easily occur with an expansion of the existing bus network.
Territory voters should not forget that the Light Rail Project only came to fruition because Labor lacked the numbers to form government and needed to gain support from the Greens sole MLA, Shane Rattenbury, who held the balance of power. And Light Rail was the ‘price paid’ for the Greens’ support.
Hopefully, the ACT voters will remember this waste and mis-management when they vote in the October Territory election.
