The public service comedy Utopia has a lot to answer for when it comes to sullying the name of “nation-building” rail projects, after it devoted an episode to the perennial political story of high-speed rail.
That may be why the high-speed rail passenger concept is often mixed up with the inland rail freight line, a less exciting but much more real plan to build a 1,727km line connecting Melbourne to Brisbane.
But there are plenty of reasons to get your head around it, given it is likely to take at least the next decade to complete and will cost more than the current $31bn blowout in the recent review by Kerry Schott.
Last year, when the Rural Network took a deep dive into the project, it was enlightening to understand how common the themes were among disparate communities along the track.
Cameron Simpkins, a former project director for the Albury to Parkes section, backed in those communities when he wrote last year in Guardian Australia that if inland rail is indeed going to be nation-building, then it should be done properly. He predicted a more realistic price tag than the then $14bn budget was $40bn. It was eerily prescient.
This week, Simpkins told me while it was great to feel vindicated, it should not have taken so long.
“I’m disappointed that it’s taken an external party, following on from me going public, for these people to suddenly wake up and realise that their work is not as good as they think it was,” he said.
Yet many critics, even ones supportive of the rail, were dismissed by National party ministers keen to promote the project without question. They were also dismissed by the commonwealth-owned Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC), the body responsible for the governance and delivery of the inland rail.
Here are some of the key questions addressed by the Schott review.
What is the price tag?
Schott compares the distance to be traversed by the inland rail to a journey between London and the Ukraine border. It crosses three states and the lands of at least 11 First Nations groups and 36 local government areas.
The scope of the project makes it hard to cost. “There is insufficient certainty about the completion date and the final cost to have confidence in the current estimates,” Schott wrote.
How well was it planned?
Not very well. Schott said the challenges of delivering the project “do not seem to have been fully appreciated by either ARTC or its shareholder [the federal government] when it was first given the go-ahead”.
Many communities along the route say they engaged with ARTC but their misgivings about noise or the proposed route cleaving towns in two were ignored in the rush to get the project started.
The Narrabri civil engineer and water irrigation specialist Jim Purcell’s sentiment was typical of communities along the tracks: if it’s such an important project, why not do it right the first time? Purcell and other Narrabri residents were concerned the rail would exacerbate the risk from flooding. When their concerns were put to the then infrastructure minister Barnaby Joyce, he said consideration of alternative routes would take too long.
What will it carry?
According to Schott, by 2050, 70% of the freight to be carried on Inland Rail will be for domestic use, including household goods and groceries produced in Australia and consumed in our major cities.
The 2015 business case prepared by the former Nationals leader John Anderson estimated that “over half of the total demand for Inland Rail by volume” would come from coal.
There is not a lot of other information in the public realm about who the freight customers will be and how the goods will move, except that they have to make the journey in 24 hours to compete against the trucking industry.
Is it economically and environmentally sound?
One of the selling points of the project is to ease traffic congestion around east coast cities and lower transport emissions. Government forecasts say that by 2050 the inland rail will cut carbon emissions by 750,000 tonnes a year and reduce the number of trucks on the road by 200,000.
But Schott notes both the inland rail project and the operating business of ARTC are facing more pressing challenges. ARTC currently relies heavily on transporting coal – according to its 2021-22 annual report, 63% of its revenue related to the coal industry.
In that same report, ARTC is hoping markets developed around the inland rail will “also reduce the risks associated with declining coal production”.
So the business case for the inland rail relied on the transport of coal but ARTC is relying on it to generate revenue to make up for the decline of the coal industry. The project may be as much a lifeline for the ARTC economically as it was for the National party politically.
Can we do big infrastructure projects as a country?
Anyone who has completed the smallest building task in the last few years knows building costs have blown out. The inland rail is just the latest in a long list of blowouts, the latest being the Sydney Metro program.
Big infrastructure projects, many of them related to transport, are increasingly crimped by a mix of labour shortages, rising construction material costs and a concentration of projects in the eastern states, according to Infrastructure Australia.
Do regional communities support it?
Regional people seem to like the theory, if not the reality, of the project.
Community confidence in the management of the ARTC, following Schott’s damning report, is going to be just one of the challenges ahead.
Inland rail staff are apparently gutted by the review and there is talk of internal restructures, following a recommendation to focus on the southern end of the project from Melbourne to Parkes.
For all their concerns, regional communities are generally supportive of the concept.
They get the freight requirements across such a big country and they assume someone has done their homework on the business case, which may be a triumph of optimism over experience.
That latent support may be why both sides of politics support the inland rail. Anthony Albanese supported it right through opposition, though he was critical of the planning. It now falls to his government to get it moving.
