“Where’s the money to come from?” We seem to have forgotten the virtuous circle by which we once funded all Australian infrastructure projects, that is, by the taxing of land values over all the jurisdictions benefitting from the infrastructure project: via municipal rates and state land taxes. Thank God our forebears just got on and did things for us without all the contrived BS! We really don’t know how this should work?

The uplift in land values from any infrastructure project is automatically incorporated into all land values and their totals appears in state and territory categories in the National Accounts at Table 61 to ABS Catalogue 5204. Separating the cost of each infrastructure project out of these land values for each infrastructure project is unnecessary: it’s ‘already in there’!

If Melbourne’s Suburban Rail Loop wasn’t warranted, maybe it shouldn’t have commenced. However, the proposed SRL isn’t just from Cheltenham to Box Hill as is being characterised by the media and the SRL’s political opponents. It does have significant raison d’être, as it would eventually loop around Melbourne and connect to airports. 

If every new infrastructure project is to be pigeonholed by the incoming government of a different political persuasion--in much the same manner as the Victorian ALP government put an end to the Liberal government’s connection between Eastlink and the Western Ring Road–then what has Australia come to in this regard?  How sad!     

Incidentally, just as our roads and freeways were once ‘free’, insofar as they were paid over a number of years out of the uplift in land values they provided, not from private tollroads, so should our railways if we want to get a vastly increasing number of people off our highways and roads and onto a more efficient means of public transport. 

We should bear these longstanding principles in mind if we’re to put an end to what appears to be current mismanagement and party politicisation of worthwhile infrastructure projects.

We need also end the intensive ‘privatisation’ or ownership of our infrastructure that we’ve come to witness. Getting the cost of infrastructure ‘off the public balance sheet‘ has come at a great cost to all Australians.