Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

Media Release Thursday, 29 November 2018

Craig Isherwood‚ National Secretary
PO Box 376‚ COBURG‚ VIC 3058
Phone: 1800 636 432
Email: cec@cecaust.com.au
Website: http://www.cecaust.com.au

Governments should learn from the Victorian election—build infrastructure!

Although a rival political party, the Citizens Electoral Council is happy to acknowledge that the Labor Party’s extraordinary win in the Victorian election was well-earned and for the right reasons.

Daniel Andrews’ victory went against the grain of election results in Australia in the past decade, by winning a second term with an increased majority.

He achieved that victory not just from his campaign but also from his record in government for the previous four years, both of which had one over-arching focus: public infrastructure.

And as part of that focus, Andrews took the lead among Australian governments and signed Victoria up to participate with 90 other countries, including New Zealand, India, Indonesia and Israel, in the biggest cooperative infrastructure vision in history, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For his efforts, he weathered extraordinary attacks from the federal government and the shadowy Five Eyes intelligence network through which MI6 and the CIA influence Australian governments, which effectively accused him of treason. The voters displayed their attitude to such accusations.

Failed neoliberalism

While the CEC does not endorse many of the Andrews Labor government’s policies, we applaud its emphasis on public infrastructure. For decades, the CEC has fought for public infrastructure projects against the neoliberal consensus of privatisation, user-pays, cost-benefit analyses distorted by profiteering motives, and short-term penny-pinching, under which Australia slipped further and further into an infrastructure “deficit” approaching a trillion dollars—the amount of money that should have been spent on infrastructure but wasn’t. In collaboration with the late engineering giant Professor Lance Endersbee AO, the CEC in 2002 produced the “Infrastructure Road to Recovery” blueprint for nation-building water, power and transportation projects around Australia.

Hitherto the major parties have turned their backs on such visionary nation-building, and the only real infrastructure they have pursued has been the Macquarie Bank model of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which are primarily built to profit investors, not benefit users, and so feature inadequate capacity and huge charges, which detract from the productivity benefits of the projects.

(The Macquarie Bank-PPP model of infrastructure is epitomised by the following boast from Dennis Eager, then Macquarie Infrastructure Group [MIG] external affairs manager, who in May 2003 boasted to investors of the expected profits from MIG’s new $2 billion M6 Midland Expressway in Britain: “We can put up the tolls by whatever we like and, almost as importantly, we can start the tolls on day one by whatever we like…. If [motorists] don’t complain about it being too high, then we won’t have done our job”.)

By historical standards, what Andrews has done is hardly revolutionary or even exceptional—before the 1980s governments naturally built infrastructure to develop Australia for future generations. But measured against the past few decades, it stands out.

Labor’s record

First, Andrews pledged to address a major cause of Melbourne’s peak-hour traffic congestion problems, railway level-crossings, and he over-delivered. He pledged to replace 25 level crossings, but after four years had replaced 29, and therefore had credibility when he promised in the election to replace the rest of Melbourne’s level crossings, which voters recognise will, despite the short-term disruption, make an enormous difference to their morning and evening commutes.

Second, he has started upgrading Melbourne’s and Victoria’s rail network, with rolling stock built in Victoria. Labor is planning fast trains from Melbourne to Geelong and Ballarat, and, finally, a railway link to the Melbourne Airport, Melbourne being the only major city in the world without one. The program includes a visionary, multi-decade plan for a suburban ring railway that will enable Melbournians to travel across the city more efficiently, the type of long-term project that governments haven’t done for decades due to their obsession with short-term considerations.

By actually delivering on needed infrastructure, and not just talking about it, Labor’s election pledges were credible, and they caught their Liberal opponents flat-footed, able only to snipe about the state debt that Labor was incurring. But Andrews was correct when he pointed out that as the debt was generating infrastructure, the resulting economic growth would enable it to be repaid.

That’s not to say that Andrews is doing everything right in infrastructure, by any means. The CEC has real concerns about some of his major policies, including the consequences of his ideological shut-down of the Hazelwood Power Station and expanded push for “renewable” energy, which puts Victoria at risk of power failures. But the public infrastructure that he has delivered, and the way he has delivered it, must be acknowledged, which the voters did in the election.

A decade after the global financial crisis proved that the neoliberal free market ideology of deregulation, privatisation and financialisation had failed, governments and political forces all over the world are starting to break with the neoliberal consensus and get back to policies that work. Jeremy Corbyn for instance is leading a political revolution in the UK Labour Party away from neoliberal Blairism and back to a public investment focus to revive British industry and its northern industrial heartland. That’s the irony about China’s success: it has raised nearly 800 million people out of poverty in a generation by emulating the public investment policies which were pioneered by countries like the United States and Australia, but abandoned under neoliberalism; now that a government like Victoria’s is going back to those policies, it can see the value in what China is doing, and wants to participate.

If other Australian governments wish to rescue their electoral fortunes, they should heed the lesson from Victoria and focus their efforts on delivering the infrastructure the country needs to grow and prosper decades into the future. If they need ideas, they should consult the CEC’s “Infrastructure Road to Recovery”.

Click here for a free copy of the CEC’s New Citizen special report, “The Infrastructure Road to Recovery”.

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