The news of the week was the price collapse of Downer, which was supposed to deliver new trains about 18 months ago. It hasn't, and as a consequence, the shares for Downer EDI went down 25% or so on Thursday, only to dead-baby-bounce up 5% yesterday. (It's interesting how a dead baby metaphorically bounces higher than a dead cat, but there you go). So today, there's this article about how all of the Public Private Partnerships have gone awry.
The cash-strapped NSW government was among the worst. If you had to concoct a list of vital infrastructure needs, virtually no one would have come up with a short tunnel from Balmain to Randwick.
But the Cross City Tunnel became a reality because the government needed cash and the investment bankers advising it knew they could sell the project to gullible investors. They worked the numbers backwards. They knew how much cash the project needed to generate, and then calculated how many cars needed to run through the tunnel to generate the cash flow. Brilliant!
And to achieve those traffic numbers, roads would be closed to ensure commuters were forced to pay.
These were projects designed not to achieve a public benefit, to solve traffic management problems, but to deliver windfall gains to a cash-strapped administration. The same process was repeated on the Lane Cove Tunnel and on the Brisbane projects.
It's nice to see the Sydney Morning Herald finally spelling out just what has been wrong with this state under the ALP. This awareness of how bad these PPPs have been, is a story that's been waiting to break for 15 years, except now that we all know how profoundly fucked they are, there's nothing we can do to fix them.
Anyway, somebody I know has been working over at Downer EDI and the last time I ran into him, he was pissed as a newt spilling interesting stories about how they *don't* work at Downer. He went out to a rail yard where they were allegedly building these carriages, and all day long he couldn't see anybody do anything resembling work. The workers all milled around in groups sucking on ciggies. He couldn't believe that was the rail carriages "being built".
There were other stories which if I divulged here would probably cause a big stink, but the sum total of the stories was that it is going to be a long time before those trains get anywhere near running on rail tracks. Believe me, I'd love to write them all here, but I don't want to be the Julian Assange of NSW rail, so you can all forget about it. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment