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Its amazing when you look at how much money we waste on complete crap and think how much renewable energy or energy efficiency we could buy for the same amount of money.
It didn't take Kev long to increase the military commitment to Afghanistan, which I believe was running around $350m pa. If that doubles and there is no result within 10 years that is a hell of a lot of renewables that could have built up. For example progressively fit a solar PV or HWS to every rooftop in Australia. Military glory seeking is one of those delusions the fossil fuel economy lets us entertain. One day there won't be spare cash for either renewables or war.
Actually the plan is for $18 billion.
- a $9 billion, 18km tunnel between Deer Park and Clifton Hill. I can assure you no-one travels between those places... no exit points in the CBD, is the plan.
- an $8 billion, 17km rail tunnel from Footscray to Caulfield.
Both are stupid ideas.
Our railways are a mess, and it's bad management. In 1927 they carried more passengers than today; in 1952 they had twice as many services as today. Of course in that time they had manual signals - some guy would step out of a hut with a stick and push the little sign this way or that - and manual track changes - the same guy with a crowbar would move the track.
Now it's all computerised and "efficient" and they provide less services and carry less passengers. What's happened is that Connex has inherited the old bureaucratic mindset of the government department. You know how you get those guys at work who do the least work they can without getting sacked? Well, this lot is the same: they provide the least services they can without losing the government contract.
They don't run it as a business. They complain that they have too many passengers and can't provide services for them all. In what real business would you consider lots of customers to be an undesirable problem?
It could be that they know that until the State buys them out, they can always get a bailout/subsidy? How many 100s of millions have they been given over the years? Anyway, what's a few billion between friends?
Perhaps their performance metric is movements per passenger?
The cynic in me says that "the Government" off loaded the network because they didn't want to
1/. spend the money to upgrade it and
2/. didn't want the risk of "failure".
So outsource the risk. If it goes wrong it's now in the private sector... nothing to do with them... "the market" will sort it out! Then they appear to do something by releasing plans and emergency packages.
The same for the electricity network.
Meanwhile, instead of helping to transition to new jobs, industries and technologies, we support the mega construction companies by pouring concrete to nowhere.
Its Kunstlerish. Support those construction jobs to support those (ever diminishing) car jobs and support the real estate releases at the fringe. Every step in isolation can probably be quantifiably justified... but over all its a roundabout to an unsustainable cul-de-sac.
But perhaps as currently measured in $$$ this kind of stupid investment gives you your biggest hit of apparent GDP growth, and therefore justifies your policies where growth is king.
The mantra is if you aren't "growing" you are "stagnating". Which is ironic to me, as stagnation (in ponds) is the result of over growth!