Beware the Devil driving the Train
There must be an election approaching as the state government is scrambling to cover off any areas of potential criticism with the latest one being regional transport.
After three years of ignoring the state of the roads across the wheatbelt the Minister for Transport has thrown a bone to the farmers by raising the bait of reopening the km of tier 3 lines.
The State Governments announcement that it would commission an engineering assessment on the cost of reinstating the lines and the economic and environmental impacts of the lines’ closure, smacks of policy playing rather than policy planning.
Why the farmers would want to get into bed with the Rail, Tram and Bus Union WA Branch, is beyond me, the WA secretary Craig McKinley RTBU is not exactly the type of friend most farmers would want to help them reduce the cost of their grain transport.
Those farmers with long memories might recall the inefficiencies of the militant rail unions of past, the closed shop deals, over staffing, midlands workshops militancy and the cosy deal with the government to force farmers to use rail over road.
And then there those ministers around the cabinet table like the current Minister for Agriculture and former Minister for Transport back in the Gallop Carpenter days who was once very keen to support the calls from some in the wood chip industry to reinstate the Greenbushes to Bunbury rail line.
In fact so keen was she for rail to be used over road that she inserted into the deal at the last minute a ban on trucks being used south of Donnybrook forcing trucks to backtrack to Greenbushes to ensure the rail line was used.
The woodchip industry then had to work very hard to backout of the deal as they had been out played and out manoeuvred by clever politicians who could see the public support of getting big trucks off the road.
As they say be careful when getting into bed with the devil. Asking a consultant to work up the real cost of road vs rail opens a pandoras box of costs economic, environmental and social. As farmers well know governments can make any report say anything if they select the right consultants and draft the right terms of reference.
One thing the report wont say is the government will pay, as all farmers know at the end of the day its farmers that pay.
The liberal party has a very clear position, it supports user pays and it supports the lowest cost option.
Currently we have 4300km of major grain roads that need a billion dollars for these key roads to be brought up to heavy haulage standard 36.5m road trains, in addition we have around 150,000 km of local council roads of which only 57% is open to 27.5m trucks and collectively there is a shortfall of $155m just to maintain them at their current state.
With more and more restrictions being placed on farmers being able to use modern efficient large trucks to cart from paddock to bin the government would have been better off offering to fix the roads that cart every single tonne of grain, fertiliser and lime not to mention the livestock before commissioning yet another report into tier 3 with no promise of any funding.
If the government is serious about Tier 3 they need to put the money on the table that they are willing to part with, noting that the cost of any upgrade to tier 2 standard is likely to be around $1m a km or as high as $2.5m to tier 3.
They also need to explain what conditions they will attach, will they be forcing grain off road and onto rail as the previous labor government attempted to do with the woodchips or will they be cutting back on their already underfunded road maintenance.
Farmers should beware the risk of backing a government which has no intention of funding tier 3 and is cleverly playing off farmer against farmer, road vs rail while they are busy quietly ripping billions from the Royalties for Regions road budget to fund its urban rail network.