Australia’s decision to buy three nuclear-powered submarines and build another eight is so expensive that, for the A$268 billion to $368 billion price tag, we could give a million dollars to every resident of Geelong, or Hobart, or Wollongong.
Those are the sort of examples used by former NSW treasury secretary Percy Allan on the Pearls and Irritations blog, “in case you can’t get your head around a billion dollars”.
Such multi-billion megaprojects almost always go over budget.
