From Election Watch  by Professor Richard Tomlinson is Chair in Urban Planning at the Melbourne School of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.

When the State Government of Victoria was preparing metropolitan Melbourne’s 2014 strategic plan, Minister Matthew Guy’s Ministerial Advisory Committee found that public transport and protecting public open space were the top concerns of Melbourne’s citizens.  Despite this the State Government’s latest planning strategy, Plan Melbourne(link is external), prioritises the East West (road) Link and commits resources to the eastern half of the link, which will compromise Royal Park.

Professor Roz Hansen, resigning as chairwoman of the committee late last year, commented that(link is external): “We are not being asked by government if we want this project; we are being told we must have it noting that there isn’t a week that goes by that the evidence against this project grows and grows.  …  Metropolitan road transport solutions used in the 1960s and ’70s do not make a great 21st century city”.

Is this criticism fair?  When Professor Hansen goes on to say that “if you only have one pot of money to spend on a major transport improvement it is not the East West Link”, is the point not just that there is only one pot, but also that the pot is dependent on grant funding from a Prime Minister who has indicated that his government will not fund public transport?
Without a constitutional mandate to prescribe State investment in private transport, but in a context of “vertical fiscal imbalance” where the Commonwealth Government gets more tax revenue than it needs, it can set the funding parameters for major transport infrastructure projects.

Continue Reading…