In a plot twist that absolutely nobody who has been watching this slow-motion derailment saw coming (everyone saw it coming), the Albanese government has announced it is dramatically scaling back Australia's inland rail megaproject - the one that was supposed to link Melbourne to Brisbane, and will now just sort of... stop in the middle.
According to reporting by the Guardian, the project will now run only from Beveridge in Victoria to Parkes in New South Wales, abandoning the entire Queensland leg of the journey. That means the 1,700km vision of a freight rail corridor stretching from Melbourne all the way to a port near Brisbane has been quietly rolled up and shoved under a very expensive rug.
So what are we actually getting?
To recap: taxpayers are staring down a price tag that has blown out to more than $45 billion, and in exchange, the country is getting a rail line that connects a suburb north of Melbourne to a regional city in central NSW that is probably best known for its telescope. It does not connect New South Wales and Queensland. It does not reach Brisbane. It does not pass Go. It does not collect $200.
The original inland rail concept was sold as a transformative freight corridor - a way to shift heavy goods off congested highways and coastal rail networks, boosting productivity and reducing wear on roads. On paper, it was genuinely exciting infrastructure policy. In practice, it has become one of the most reliably over-budget, under-delivered megaprojects in recent Australian memory.
A long and painful history
The project has been "beleaguered" - the Guardian's word, and a generous one - for years. Cost estimates have ballooned repeatedly, route decisions have sparked fierce community opposition particularly in Queensland, and reviews have piled up faster than the actual dirt being moved. The NSW-Queensland section in particular became a political and logistical nightmare, with landholders, councils, and state governments raising objections at various stages.
The Albanese government's decision to cut the Queensland connection essentially concedes that the most controversial and complex sections of the project are no longer viable under current conditions.
What happens now?
The truncated Beveridge-to-Parkes corridor will presumably continue, though "continue" is doing a lot of work given the project's history. Whether a future government revisits the Queensland extension - or whether this marks the permanent death of the original vision - remains to be seen.
What is clear is that Australia has managed to spend an eye-watering sum of money on a rail project that will not, in fact, connect the two largest states on the eastern seaboard by rail. Somewhere, a very expensive feasibility study is having a good cry.
Source: The Guardian
