When the architecturally splendid Oculus opened in 2016 as the new transport hub for New York’s World Trade Centre, its $US4 billion price tag ($5.3 billion at the time) made it the most expensive train station in the world.
The cost for Sunshine station in Melbourne’s west is already up to $4 billion.
If it follows the budgetary path of the West Gate Tunnel, the Metro Tunnel, North East Link and most major projects in Australia, its final cost will put the Oculus’ gleaming white steel and glass structure in the shade.
How can you spend $4 billion on a train station?
Even within the extravagant context of major projects in Victoria, the price tag for works at Sunshine station and its surrounding rail yards is enough to make the Fat Controller choke on his morning tea.
Yet, on the day Anthony Albanese and Jacinta Allan announced this boiler-bursting sum of combined Commonwealth and state funds to rebuild a train interchange in Melbourne’s west, no one so much as raised an eyebrow, let alone thought to ask the PM or the Victorian premier why it will cost so much.
Have we arrived at a point, after a decade of the Big Build, that a billion here, a billion there and you’re still not talking about real money? Or did the fiscal harakiri of the COVID years disembowel our capacity for rational budgeting?
To answer these questions, you’d need a team of psychiatrists to put the entire state on the couch. In the meantime, there is welcome evidence this week that someone with the ear of government is trying to bring a level of financial reality back to how a debt-ridden state needs to think about infrastructure.
Within Infrastructure Victoria’s latest iteration of its 30-year strategy, you won’t find recommendations for expensive new cross-city tunnels; massive, multi-lane highways; or big, vote-grabbing public transport projects.
Instead, there are recommendations to re-route Melbourne’s tired bus network and to extend train routes west and tram routes east to provide more public transport options in poorly serviced parts of a fast-growing city.
There is a strong case made for more social housing and for governments to deliver more of the social infrastructure that newer suburbs on the edge of Melbourne and regional centres need. This includes kindergartens, TAFEs, public libraries and swimming pools.
A proposed 30km/h speed zone in residential streets, although ripe for talkback callers to lampoon, is less about managing local traffic than encouraging more kids to get on their bikes or walk to school.
The Age
This is nothing more than another P*SS TAKE of the taxpayer, there is not a station in the world of that size costing that amount of money. Kill it off immediately.