Page 3081 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 August 2013
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I do not think, though, that we are the only ones that are sceptics about light rail. I would imagine that there are many within the government, throughout the bureaucracy that are looking at the figures, and perhaps at the ministerial level, who have real concerns. I would imagine that there is less enthusiasm for this project in the Treasurer’s office, where he is looking at the numbers and realising the impact that this is going to have on the territory budget for decades to come, than perhaps there is with respect to the ideological drive of his colleague Mr Corbell and their Greens partner, Mr Rattenbury.
We will continue to do this, because I have noted this week that when I have heard the enthusiastic “hear, hears” and cheers for light rail, I have not heard that coming from Mr Barr. That may be because he was distracted, but it appears to me that there is a split on that side and that Mr Barr is wavering. I would love to be behind closed doors in cabinet discussions where Mr Barr is clearly not getting his way, because the Chief Minister needs to keep Mr Rattenbury on board. She wants to keep her government on the tracks, if you will pardon the pun. Mr Barr would probably be coming to the cabinet with some real concerns, and he is getting rolled at every step of the way.
I note that those members opposite are not necessarily disagreeing with my analysis. It would be very interesting to see whether Mr Barr is going to commit to this without the sort of caveats that we would expect, because we have been down this road before. We have been down this road before on the government office building. It is almost the same sort of thing. The government said to us, “This is the magic pudding. This is the only way to do business. We’re going to spend”—and I think back then that was the biggest appropriation in territory history. It was hundreds of millions of dollars. They spent $5 million of taxpayers’ money articulating their case, demanding it, saying that this was the best thing in the territory’s interest, and then when there was a change of leader the thing went away. There was a backflip.
The question is: will the same thing happen here? What we have is a similar project in terms of its scale, although light rail is actually a few hundred million dollars more. We have a government that is insisting that it is the way to go, without presenting all of the evidence, and we have money being put in the budget to try and justify the case. Probably what will happen is that when we get to such a point that the evidence is compelling against the case, we will see a backflip from the government.
I am not sure who will lead that backflip. I am not sure if it will be led by Mr Barr. I am not sure if it will be necessitated by a change in the leadership. I am not sure if they realise that a backflip would see the splintering of the government, with Mr Rattenbury leaving the government, or whatever consequence might occur. But I think it would be interesting for observers to look at this government and see where they are going to go with light rail and whether they are going to stay committed to it. I think Mr Rattenbury will. He will go all the way to the election with this crusade. And I think Mr Corbell probably would want to as well. I think Mr Corbell would want to go all the way, because it is not about the facts for him and it is not about the evidence; it is about the ideology and it is about his competition with Mr Rattenbury on the left of politics.
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