http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/i...211945065.html
It's high time Nobody was given the boot
November 7, 2005
Down the road the Cross City Tunnel "toll" won't be $3.56, writes Paul Sheehan.
IN MY living room I have a statue of Bob Carr, about a metre tall, one of the caricatures by the Herald's John Shakespeare, some of which are in the Australian Museum in Canberra. Early one evening, the phone rang and on the other end was the unmistakable stentorian baritone of the real Bob Carr.
I mentioned that I was standing next to my statue of him. The then-premier, without missing a beat, replied, "I look forward to the day when everyone will have a statue of me in their living room."
Effigy would be more like it these days, if he were still in charge.
As much as I miss having Carr around, his sudden and unforeseen resignation announcement on July 27 this year - he would clean out his office and be gone from politics within six days - appears, in retrospect, to be an act of supernaturally good exit timing.
In the short space since his departure, plans for the construction and financing of a desalination plant in Sydney have been unveiled, revealing that the plant would add the equivalent of 53,000 new vehicles in greenhouse gas emissions annually and that the millionaires factory, Macquarie Bank, is looking for a piece of the action.
Then there is the grotesquerie of the Cross City Tunnel, which has opened up a chasm of credibility in public trust for the State Government and the tunnel's owners, a consortium led by a subsidiary of the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, by Deutsche Asset management, a subsidiary of Germany's Deutsche Bank, and Bilfinger Berger BOT, a German infrastructure group.
And on the subject of chasms, there is the Lane Cove Tunnel excavation.
Carr got out just in time. But all these infrastructure projects began on his watch. He has earned every right to make a buck in his post-political life, but there is something queasy about him so quickly becoming a well-paid consultant to Macquarie Bank. Especially now, when the whole nature of so-called public-private partnerships and the brave new world of privatising the public realm is beginning to smell like plutocracy to the taxpaying, toll-paying electorate.
The decision to make the Cross City Tunnel free for three weeks was not merely a sign of panic, not merely a public relations stunt, but an attempt by the owners to get some estimate from Planet Earth, rather than Pluto, about how much traffic this asset may ever generate. What this ad-hoc survey told them was that even as a toll-free expressway, only about 50,000 use the tunnel per day.
At least Carr won't have to answer the hard questions that have not yet even be put, let alone answered:
Did the contract for the Cross City Tunnel breach the Main Roads Act (1924), which requires the state to build roadways for public use, not close them for private gain?
Were details of the project leaked strategically to CrossCity Motorway Inc, as claimed by the former transport minister, Carl Scully?
Who in the NSW Government was responsible for signing this contract and endorsing the traffic projections which underpinned it?
If it was Scully, why is he still a minister in the NSW Government, given his previous misadventures with the railway system?
Does the Premier, Morris Iemma, regard the contract, with its commitments to close public roadways, as acceptable?
Why was there no reconciliation between the private owners' projections that more than 84,000 vehicles would use the tunnel daily, increasing to 90,000 within three years, and the Government's forecast of 60,000 vehicles a day?
Who will accept responsibility for placing the initial one-way toll at $3.53?
If it is Peter Sansom, why is he still chief executive of the tunnel company?
Did the consortium pay more for this asset than can ever be extracted over the 30-year life of the contract?
Will the tunnel owners sue the NSW Government if it seeks to redress the congestion issue by reopening roads?
If so, would Sansom be acting on the instructions of the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, who controls the company with the largest stake in the tunnel consortium?
Would any lawsuit be on the instructions of Deutsche Bank, a conglomerate which wants to manage a large slab of Australia's superannuation assets?
Would legal action also be on the instructions of Bilfinger Berger, a company seeking a position in Australia's world-leading public-private infrastructure industry?
On September 12, just days after the tunnel opened, this column described it as the Ghost Tunnel, an act of blackmail sitting on a foundation of lies, and asked who took responsibility for pricing the tunnel's toll and for closing city arteries. Two months later, the answer appears to be - Nobody.
On October 10, this column named the people with executive responsibility for this debacle: Carl Scully, Paul Forward, Peter Sansom, with Bob Carr at arm's length but still responsible as head of the government, and with the Transport Minister, Joe Tripodi, sliding towards the credibility chasm.
Carr is gone. Forward, head of the Roads and Traffic Authority, has been sacked. Two down, two to go. The solutions are as self-evident as the mistakes. Roads have to be reopened, and the toll reduced to $2.
If Sansom, Li and Deutsche Bank intend to sue the Government should it reopen roads, if threats have been privately made that the contract will be enforced, we need to know. It's time for Iemma to call their bluff. This circus has been run by Nobody for too long.
07-11-2005, 10:11 PM
A very interesting word of opinion on the Cross City Tunnel
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