Friday 29th of March 2024

creative accounting...

choochoochoochoo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The NSW government’s upcoming budget deficit would be $2.7 billion worse than forecast – or almost 50 per cent bigger than expected – without a controversial rail entity propping it up, with a further $1.3 billion benefit the following year.

A confidential Treasury document from February also warns that any attempt to abolish the Transport Asset Holding Entity (TAHE) would create a massive $14.6 billion hole in the budget over the next 10 years.

“Dissolution puts pressure on funding and is high risk to deliver,” the document states.

The Treasury document reveals the entity would deliver a benefit of up to $10 billion to the budget in the four years to 2023-24, which includes a $2.7 billion boost in the 2021-22 financial year, and a $1.3 billion benefit the year after. In November, the government forecast a deficit for 2021-22 of $5.8 billion.

 

The document shows these projections come on top of state budgets gaining a combined $8.5 billion boost in the first five years of the rail entity.

The estimated benefits don’t include the cost to the budget of TAHE charging access fees at a commercial rate for use of its rail assets.

Amid calls for a series of inquiries, the government tried to downplay the significance of a report commissioned by Transport for NSW last year which cast serious doubts on TAHE.

Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said the government “stands by its strong economic record of delivering for the people of NSW”.

“The financial treatment of TAHE was clearly set out in the 2015-16 NSW budget,” he said.

But Labor MP and leadership aspirant Michael Daley, who has called for an upper house inquiry into TAHE, said the budget that would be handed down in three weeks “is a lie, just like the last five before now”.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/budget-lie-internal-forecasts-show-rail-entity-propping-up-state-s-finances-20210602-p57xfm.html

 

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a former cock up...

In service for four decades, the now geriatric trains need replacing. The 512 new carriages, which will cost $2.3 billion to build, will have mobile phone charging points, accessible toilets and more space for bike racks and luggage. But they are also 3.1m wide, around 20cm broader than the V-sets.

TfNSW sets out a “kinematic envelope”, the minimum clearance around trains, which takes into account how much carriages can sway and tilt. This envelope demands a 200mm distance between the carriage and any tunnel walls or line side equipment.

But the new trains’ extra bulk will infringe these minimum distances and could see the roof and base of the trains come into contact with the tunnel walls.

In a Review of Environmental Factors report, TfNSW said widening all of the tunnels and realigning the track was prohibitively expensive but doing nothing was also not an option.

Instead, they recommended a “sub-medium electric standard” which will essentially see the current regulations watered down so the wider trains can operate.

“This option would allow the New Intercity Fleet to operate on both lines and pass each other, and therefore ensure better longer term operational outcomes, while also minimising heritage impacts through reduced tunnel lining modifications,” the report states.

In addition, the tunnels would also be “notched” in places. This involves gouging a chunk out of the existing tunnel where the clearance is narrowest to allow the new trains the pass through.

This gouge could be almost 13cm deep, much of which will take place on curves where trains are more prone to swaying.

Around a third of the total length of the tunnels will have to be modified in a process that could take two years and will involve parts of the line to be closed for periods.

Labor has said the admission that 10 tunnels will have to be modified because the new trains are too wide is an embarrassment for Transport Minister Andrew Constance.

He has had a torrid few months with a new timetable causing chaos, bruising encounters with unions and the Ferry McFerryface debacle over the botched naming of a new boat.

 

Read more:

https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/nsws-2-billion-new-trains-are-too-wide-to-get-through-tunnels/news-story/47bd2ee36f43cd3cdd2819078feb6011

 

And let's not mention the new Sydney (ugly) ferries that are too high for people to stay on the top deck while going under bridges...

 

 

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railcorpse...

According to Perrottet, everything is above board "as other states have done it"....

 

Meanwhile:

 

Questions raised about sacking of NSW transport boss and state budget cover-up

 

A former New South Wales auditor-general has accused the state government of using an ‘accounting gimmick’ to artificially inflate its budgets by tens of billions of dollars over six years.

An investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald has revealed the state government had sought to cover up the inflation, and has raised questions about the sacking of a senior public servant.

The state government had used the Transport Asset Holding Entity (TAHE) — a shell corporation that was established in 2015 and officially became a statutory state owned corporation last year — as part of its plan.

 

The entity was formerly known as RailCorp, a state government agency that ran the metropolitan rail network. The agency was scrapped in 2013, when current Premier Gladys Berejiklian was transport minister.

According to the Herald, NSW Treasury had used the TAHE to hide a budget deficit in 2018, in what former NSW auditor-general Tony Harris has described as an ‘accounting gimmick’ and a ‘financial mirage’. He has estimated that the plan has boosted the state’s operating result by more than $30 billion over the last six years.

The state government had placed the costs of the rail network onto the TAHE. But last year, a KPMG transport review commissioned by Transport for NSW had predicted that the TAHE would end up costing the budget $5.3 billion over 10 years.

Documents have shown that the Treasury urged KPMG to remove the damning findings from the report.

 

 Transport secretary sacked amid fight over report

 

The investigation has also raised questions over the dismissal of former Transport for NSW secretary Rodd Staples.

Staples was terminated without reason or notice last November. It has been revealed that, in the days leading up to his dismissal, Treasury and KPMG had both contacted Staples regarding the review. Treasury had claimed the report contained errors, while KPMG had defended the report.

In light of the revelations, former counsel assisting the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption Geoffrey Watson has called for the ICAC to investigate Staples’ dismissal and the budget cover-up.

Labor MP Michael Daley has accused Premier Berejiklian, treasurer Dominic Perrottet, and transport minister Andrew Constance of all being in on the cover-up.

“This may be the most dishonest budgetary fraud ever concocted by a NSW state government and it goes all the way to the top,” he wrote on Twitter.

“The NSW budget has been based on a massive lie for years.”

 

Read more:

https://www.themandarin.com.au/158659-questions-raised-about-sacking-of-nsw-transport-boss-and-state-budget-cover-up/

 

 

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corporate welfare...

 

The NSW government secretly offered $50 million in taxpayer funds to Qantas to head off a bidding war with rival states to keep the airline’s global headquarters in Sydney.

Under heavy financial pressure from the effects of the global pandemic, Qantas announced last September it was reconsidering the location of its headquarters in a move heavily criticised by federal Trade Minister Simon Birmingham as a “blatant appeal for corporate welfare”.

 

Nevertheless, a week after a confidential package was outlined in a letter from Treasurer Dominic Perrottet to Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce, the company announced in April that agreements were being finalised to keep the national carrier’s headquarters in NSW.

The agreements were to be commercial-in-confidence.

 

However, the Herald can reveal the contents of the Treasurer’s proposal after his letter was included in a trove of documents tabled to State Parliament.

It gives the first indication of the lengths the NSW government had been willing to go to, to entice Qantas to remain in Mascot, in Sydney’s inner-south, after the company announced a review of its property footprint.

The lure of the company’s 3500-strong workforce sparked a bidding war with Queensland and Victoria.

Mr Perrottet’s offer came with strings attached, including that the airline must create an additional 2000 jobs and run its new ultra long-haul flights exclusively out of Sydney for five years.

The offer remains the subject of ongoing negotiations even though the three-way tussle ended in early May with Qantas’s statement to the ASX.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw-treasurer-tables-secret-50m-bid-to-keep-qantas-in-sydney-20210607-p57yv7.html

 

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a non-grant...

 

A NSW public servant was worried a contract between the state government and a farming company initiated by Deputy Premier John Barilaro was unethical and questioned if it could be “bribery”.

The bureaucrat’s anxiety over the deal is recorded in a file note taken in January and tabled in the NSW upper house last week.

The note reveals the bureaucrat raised questions with a colleague about what the agreement was for.

 

They were told Mr Barilaro had visited Monaro Farming Systems (MFS) and promised the company money for “extension services”, but that this information could not be put in the contract.

The $50,000 was set to come from the Department of Primary Industries.

MFS would issue an invoice and putting a contract in place would give the invoice legitimacy, the note records.

“I am concerned about the nature of this agreement,” the bureaucrat wrote.

“I am concerned about the ethics of this – is it favouritism? Is it bribery? This does not sit well with me. Would I be complicit?”

The public servant thought that the payment was really a grant and asked their colleague whether that was being disguised.

“(The colleague) said it was preferential that it was a contractual agreement not grant because if it came out, every grower group would want a grant,” the notes read.

A Department of Primary Industries email the week before, also presented to the parliament, suggests Mr Barilaro was instrumental in the contract establishment.

 

“We need to get in touch with the CEO of Monaro Farming Systems to send them a contract … we have been directed by the deputy premier to provide them with $50K to provide ‘outreach services and support industry adoption’,” the email says.

“I have nothing that I can send in terms of a schedule of work – you will just need to keep it high level and vague.”

Monaro Farming Systems is an agricultural co-operative in Mr Barilaro’s electorate of Monaro.

It researches how to improve farming and grazing systems in the area.

It was established by Richard Taylor, brother of the federal energy minister Angus Taylor.

Richard Taylor was the company’s chair until 2019.

A spokeswoman for Mr Barilaro said in a statement that he was not the agriculture minister and had no jurisdiction over the Department of Primary Industries.

“As local member it is standard practice for the deputy premier to advocate for projects within the Monaro electorate.

“A personal file note written by an unidentified bureaucrat does not reflect government process.”

Mr Barilaro said in parliamentary question time on Thursday that he would keep advocating for the people of Monaro.

“Don’t always believe what you read,” he said.

In a statement to AAP, MFS Chair John Murdoch said he had lobbied for federal and state government support for years and was frustrated by the “innuendo” in media reporting of the contract.

“I’m not sure what the link that is being proposed is,” he said.

“(I) have no connection to the National party.”

Mr Murdoch says MFS contacted Mr Barilaro’s office numerous times, as he was the local member, to raise funding issues and the ramifications to the farming community and environment should MFS run out of money.

“I made the same attempts with federal (Labor) members Mike Kelly and Kristy McBain,” he said.

Mr Murdoch says the funds haven’t been received yet, but would be spent on research and development projects, administration and extension services.

Opposition rural affairs spokesman Mick Veitch said on Thursday that Mr Barilaro still had questions to answer.

“Is this a grant? Or is it a bribe? And just how did the money come about?” Mr Veitch said.

“The people of NSW want an open and transparent process when it comes to allocating funds.”

Mr Veitch said the documents showed Mr Barilaro was “happily spending money” from other ministerial departments.

Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall has been contacted for comment.

-AAP

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/06/10/nsw-deputy-premier-john-barilaro-payment-questions/

 

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drunken accounting...

The NSW government seriously considered commercialising the entire public transport and road networks to artificially inflate the state budget by hiding billions of dollars in costs.

A highly confidential report for the government by consultancy giant PwC reveals that corporatising the state’s transport networks was deemed the best option to plug a multi-billion dollar budget black hole from a shell corporation it had created.

The state’s ferries, trains, light rail, buses and roads, worth tens of billions of dollars, would be placed into a commercial corporation with its own board and management, run independently of the government.

The leaked PwC report, obtained by the Herald, reveals that commercialising the entire transport network would not adversely impact customers but could create tensions in the organisation between safety and turning a profit.

 

The report sheds new light on the growing concerns aired privately at the highest levels of government about the Transport Asset Holding Entity, which culminated in the sacking without reason of Transport for NSW boss Rodd Staples last November.

A Herald investigation revealed in June that TAHE was set up in 2015 to enable the government to hide the costs of the state’s rail system. It prompted former NSW Auditor-General Tony Harris to describe the entity as a financial mirage that had bolstered the government’s operating result by more than $30 billion over the past six years “through an accounting gimmick”.

 

Labor finance spokesman Daniel Mookhey said the PwC report showed how desperate the government was to “prop up its TAHE budget trick”.

“Turning Transport for NSW into a for-profit corporation is a harebrained idea. In truth, TAHE is a budget bomb. If the government tries to operate it, the public will fork out billions. But if they unwind it, the budget will be smashed,” he said.

 

“The government cooked up this idea so it could keep hiding the true cost of operating the rail system from the budget.”

 

TAHE was set up in 2015 to bolster the budget by taking costs off the government’s balance sheet into a shell corporation. However, changes to Australian accounting standards in 2018 put TAHE at risk.

Under the new rules, TAHE had to show it was truly independent of the government and turning profits. If it failed to do this, it would cost the budget $2.4 billion a year, according to the PwC report.

To avoid the budget hit, PwC considered five business models for TAHE and Transport and Treasury settled on the corporatisation of the entire network as the “preferred option”.

 

But it warned that corporatising the entire transport network faced a series of “high risk” roadblocks, including upheaval of the transport agency’s heavily unionised workforce, potential safety risks and political opposition.

The report, completed in December 2019, said if these “show stoppers” could not be overcome, unwinding TAHE was “expected to be the likely best alternative”.

It warned that dismantling TAHE would still cost the state budget more than $8 billion over four years.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/harebrained-idea-secret-plan-to-commercialise-state-s-public-transport-roads-20210818-p58joa.html

 

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the casino of macquarie street...

 Is it coincidence that Gladys Berejiklian’s rival Dominic Perrottet is suddenly embroiled in the “Wolf of Wall Street scandal”? Michael West investigates NSW leadership tensions and the New Generations Fund.

 

Who would knock Gladys off? Seven Network, virtually the communications department of the Liberal Party, is touting a StuartAyres/David Elliott ticket is in the wings but says Treasurer Dominic Perrottet remains the frontrunner in any challenge for the leadership in NSW.

It’s the classic struggle of the Left versus the Right.

Gladys has so spectacularly muffed the pandemic, and ICAC is bearing down on her still, so it is little wonder there is talk of a spill.

Yet the Premier of NSW has been enormously popular. An incredible communicator, Berejiklian has the uncanny ability to contradict herself with absolute conviction, to obfuscate, day in day out, with such dogmatic authenticity that even she appears to believe she is telling the truth.

Eventually however, somebody will have to take responsibility for the Covid mess and it won’t be the backroom boys who counsel her. It won’t be Michael Photios or Don Harwin, her factional power-brokers.

In politics, everybody is dead meat. It’s just a matter of time. Few go out as winners, and Gladys is unlikely to be among the few.

It is clear she did not “follow the health advice”. To quote Gladys herself says when she is being unclear, “I can’t be any clearer than that”.

So it is that the games have begun – the Premier is under siege from both the Left and the Right – and a strange thing is happening. The AFR, a property of Nine Entertainment, therefore close to the Liberals, is really piling on Perrottet. And the pile-on has begun seeping into other media.

Is it a hatchet job?

Perrottet set up what is best described as a state hedge fund back in 2018. This New Generations Fund (NGF) was established to pay down the State’s very large debt. Instead, it has morphed into a hedge fund punting everything from junk bonds to the overheated sharemarket and a sky-high bond market.

Governments punting public money is a recipe for disaster but NSW has just gone next-gen by privatising public assets, and not only punting that, but also gearing up to do it right at the zenith of the markets, when asset prices are through the roof.

They’ve ignored a couple of basics on risk. One, don’t bet with other people’s money. Debt does super-charge your returns on the way up, but equally your losses on the way down. And, two, markets go up … and down.

The theory behind the NGF is that interest rates are so low that NSW – specifically the fund managers NSW Treasury Corp – can get a better return elsewhere. There is something to this. Yet there is also something to the fact that markets don’t rise for ever, and a safer option would be to pay down NSW debt rather than go to the races.

Mind you, they are not entirely alone.

North of the border, the Queenslanders (QIC) slotted huge licks of public capital into a coal terminal, buying a large chunk of Brookfield’s Dalrymple Bay Coal Terminal when coal is in terminal decline. It has cost them already as the float of the coal asset predictably flopped from day one.

 

But NSW has gone next-gen with New Gen. They are not just betting on the share market, it’s the overcooked bond market as well, hedge funds, junk bonds, private equity. Right at the top, with asset prices sky high, here are the guardians of public money, having a hairy-chested punt.

As the AFR’s Chris Joye put it (good explainer here):

“And by concurrently denying NSW’s budget access to the Debt Retirement Fund’s existing $15 billion of cash savings, which were funded by prior budget surpluses and asset sales (this will soon go to $27 billion when the second half of WestConnex is sold next month)”.

So, instead of paying down debt and deploying the money from privatisations to build new infrastructure they’ve gone to the casino.

What is peculiar though is that the AFR is already calling it a “scandal”. Yet right now, because markets are so high, Perrottet and his asset managers from NSW T-Corp have been braining it, making money hand over fist.

The journalists covering the story know their stuff. They are right that Perrottet is operating in a “regulatory no-man’s land”, but it is the sheer intensity of the pile-on which is interesting, and the fact that it is spilling into other media, and that there are no losses … yet.

Traditionally, in AFR-land, scandals only occur once there are losses. Traditionally, the financial press piles on and “bayonets the dead” when it’s too late, when the scandal has been done, the losses had. Not this time. “As Gladys’ woes have deepened, so has coverage Dominic Perrottet’s “Wolf of Wall Street scandal”. So it would appear that the power brokers of the NSW Left is doing a hatchet job on the Wolf of Rawson Street, Epping.

This is the stuff of leadership struggles

Perrottet is very capable, indeed by far the obvious choice of preferred leader for the NSW Right (even though his conservatism has softened this year to make a case for leadership). Elsewhere, there are no shortage of aspirants on the Left. Marise Payne’s partner Stuart Ayres and Police Minister David Elliott are lurking. Matt Kean, also a power-broker of the Left, has ambitions, and Attorney-General Mark Speakman is also mooted as a possible contender.

 

Perrottet is no stranger to scandal, the Icare debacle being one. And he has also fallen afoul of the Federal Liberals- perhaps with Gladys Berejiklian too – for trying to push the cost of state lockdown onto the Commonwealth, recently drawing the ire of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg.

As evinced by Gladys’s handling of the Covid crisis, NSW is run by business for business. Disgraced Labor power-broker Eddie Obeid once described the passage between the offices of the factional power brokers to the office of the NSW Finance Minister as a “goat track”.

As one senior Liberal remarked, if you are a business and you want the laws changed in your favour in NSW, you scurry up to Michael Photios’ office and get him on a retainer. Berejiklian’s ascent to the top office came at the expense of the push for democratic reform in the party by her predecessor Mike Baird. Business has the state government by the short and curlies.

More broadly for the citizens of the state – the people who ought to hold the power, the voters – their elected representatives cling to the neo-liberal notion that business knows best. Hence the slather of privatisations over the years. Few have even yet paused to ask what the blazes the state is doing delivering up monopoly profits, time and again, to big business via asset sales, while the state has moved so aggressively back into the private space speculating on financial markets and even deploying public money to punt oyster farms and boutique beef investments.

This is the paradox. What investment manager in their right mind would sell a monopoly which spits out cash – like power stations, ports, the lucrative Lands Titles Office, indeed a massive chunk of the electricity grid – only to invest in stuff where they have no competitive advantage, no monopoly, but merely an army of fee-hungry brokers to feed?

It is all quite bizarre, but unfortunately, among our politicians, almost universally accepted.

This article has been republished from Michael West Media.

 

Read more:

https://johnmenadue.com/gladys-leadership-rumours-rise-as-rival-perrottet-embroiled-in-scandal/

 

 

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under fire...

Premier Dominic Perrottet is under fire after it emerged he was at a high-level meeting that sealed the fate of a controversial $40 billion rail corporation despite warnings it should be dismantled over safety and financial concerns.

The meeting in September last year to discuss the future of the Transport Asset Holding Entity (TAHE) included Mr Perrottet, then premier Gladys Berejiklian and one of NSW’s most powerful public servants, Treasury secretary Mike Pratt.

Emails tabled in Parliament as part of an inquiry into the rail corporation – sparked by a Herald investigation – reveal Ms Berejiklian was “unequivocal [at the meeting] that TAHE will go ahead”, and that “everyone was well across the challenges but also imperative”.

Former KPMG partner Brendan Lyon told the inquiry on Monday that he was humiliated, bullied and discredited by a so-called “hit squad” that included Mr Pratt when he refused to change a report that warned of safety risks and that the state budget would be more than $10 billion worse off than Treasury claimed.

 

Labor’s treasury spokesman Daniel Mookhey said the email in September last year detailing the meeting made it clear that Mr Perrottet was intimately involved in Treasury’s efforts to force Mr Lyon to change his report.

“Treasury secretary Mike Pratt’s presence at this meeting with Mr Perrottet [the treasurer at the time] and Premier Berejiklian ... shows that Treasury was winning the TAHE civil war inside the NSW government,” he said.

“Mr Perrottet’s explicit backing gave licence to the Treasury to continue their extraordinary campaign to force changes to Mr Lyon’s report.”

 

....

 

Mr Perrottet also rejected Labor’s claims that TAHE was a budget deception, and said any suggestion that safety was compromised as a result of the corporation being established was unfounded.

The account of the high-level meeting involving Mr Perrottet on September 11 last year is outlined in an email from KPMG senior partner James Hunter, who is regarded as “very close” to Mr Pratt and a “rainmaker” for clinching Treasury contracts for KPMG.

 

Notably, the then Transport for NSW chief Rodd Staples was absent from the meeting, only several months after he had raised serious concerns with Cabinet about TAHE.

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/intimately-involved-premier-under-attack-over-controversial-40-billion-rail-entity-20211109-p597ha.html

 

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off the tracks...

Stories about Gladys Berejiklian’s private life or bureaucratic fights might sell papers, but they distract from grave problems in transport policy.

Stupidity is a big problem in NSW transport. Pointing motorways to CBDs or ”bespoke” infrastructure that precludes operational flexibility being two examples.

It arises from policymaking behind closed doors and pressure to cheer on ‘‘great concepts’’. An example is financial engineering for Sydney’s railway — leading to uproar about whether a new scheme misrepresents NSW’s financial position.

The scheme involves a for-profit, state-owned corporation — Transport Asset Holding Entity — owning rail assets while a separate authority, Sydney Trains, runs trains and — for the moment — maintains the assets.

The scheme appears to ignore painful lessons — including rail accidents — from almost identical arrangements in the UK and NSW in the late 1990s.

Parliamentary inquiry

A Legislative Council Inquiry into the scheme has intensified the debate. The debate is one Premier Dominic Perrottet can ill-afford to lose — being a leading proponent of the scheme. Yet it is not going his way.

Two questions arise. Is the government’s accounting treatment of the scheme appropriate? And is it safe?

On the accounting question, the auditor-general is holding-off approving the state’s accounts. There are allegations of “behind the scenes” intimidation and attempts to rewrite reports of consultants to make the accounting appear reasonable.

The safety question remains vexed. At the inquiry, former Transport secretary Rodd Staples expressed doubts. He said this was a contention with Treasury last year, advised then premier Gladys Berejiklian of his concerns and considered resigning. Others suggest this is associated with his hitherto unexplained sacking.

The inquiry has published a treasure trove of information including cabinet documents. The premier’s department asked for withdrawal of the documents. They remain at the inquiry’s website. Parliament’s Privileges Committee is to consider the issue. Constitutional conflict between Parliament and the government may ensue.

The inquiry’s information shows a dilemma: the government wants the auditor-general and the public to believe Sydney’s railway tracks are independently controlled by a profitable state-owned corporation that doesn’t run trains.

Yet it wants the public, and rail safety regulator, to believe something else — it controls the tracks via Transport for NSW and Sydney Trains. And that because Sydney Trains is doing the track maintenance, all is in hand.

Cause

Whatever the outcome of the debate, one document at the inquiry points to a cause visible in other transport fiascos since the Coalition took office in 2011.

The document is a 2016 Cabinet submission by then transport minister Andrew Constance and treasurer Gladys Berejiklian. Assuming it is bona fide — why else would the premier’s department seek withdrawal? — an apparently innocuous word in it reveals an astounding policy wreck.

The relevant text seemingly presages the safety issue now being debated:

“One concern is that splitting the maintenance of rail assets from operations is contrary to the recommendations of the Glenbrook or Waterfall (accident) inquiries.”

On that basis, it argued Sydney Trains’ maintaining the tracks would conform with inquiry recommendations — and deal with safety by keeping maintenance and operations together. However, the key word is: “or”.

A submission by ministers with nearly a decade experience in transport, backed by large departments and offices — on an issue with multi-billion dollar and public safety consequences — not knowing which? A guess?

Alas, the wrong guess. Neither inquiry made such recommendations. They recommended something else.

The very first recommendation of the Glenbrook second interim report was:

That the infrastructure owner RAC and the infrastructure maintainer RSA cease to be state-owned corporations and that their property and functions be merged into a single statutory authority, to be known as the Rail Infrastructure Authority, responsible to the minister for transport.

The Glenbrook recommendation was not about ensuring infrastructure maintenance is performed by a train operator. Rather, it sought to ensure maintenance was not split from the track owner, and the track owner was not to be a State-owned corporation.

The cabinet submission sought the opposite to what Glenbrook recommended. Apparently, it was accepted and underpins the current scheme. If cabinet had been properly advised would we be looking at a “train wreck for NSW government”?

The submission also seems the source of another persistent misunderstanding — about ”access charges” — that goes to the heart of the accounting question. It told cabinet an $800 million annual payment from Sydney Trains to the entity is needed to ”cover the costs of leasing or accessing the assets’’. More to the point, it is needed to make the scheme work.

To enable the payment, the government would give Sydney Trains this amount.

Under NSW regulation, the minimum access charge is the cost, to the track owner, of maintenance and train control. Sydney Trains performs these functions, apparently gratis, for the entity. Sydney Trains would not gain any benefit in return for an additional payment.

Hence most of the $800 million looks less like a ‘‘commercial’’ transaction than a gift with a deceptive name — from the government to the entity, washed through Sydney Trains. There is an open question whether Sydney Trains should — even can — pay it without orders from government.

When asked about the supposed access charge at the Inquiry, officials mentioned the NSW economic regulator — IPART — creating an image that all is well. IPART subsequently felt a need to put in a late submission to clarify the facts.

It seems the access charge/gift/IPART role has caused great confusion and is among triggers of the auditor-general’s doubt about the government’s scheme. If access was properly explained to cabinet, would there be the present turmoil?

A continuation of earlier policy

On safety and access, the cabinet submission is a continuation of a direction started in 2012-13 when Berejiklian was transport minister. Then the rail assets were moved away from the train operator/maintainer into her department — Transport for NSW. Reports had two predictable results ensuing.

First, a maintenance backlog developed. It will be hard to remedy. The likely reason it hasn’t had serious consequences — so far — is the reduction in rail use due to the pandemic.

Second, Treasury ogled the department’s new train set. Just a year later, in 2014, it had designs to move the assets to its portfolio.

The 2016 cabinet submission aimed to turn that into official policy. It appears some time then passed before the policy became a burning concern in the transport portfolio.

If Treasury remains unaware the 2016 cabinet submission was wrong on safety and access, I could understand it perceiving Transport for NSW’s belated concerns to be a bureaucratic tantrum.

Treasury would already have had doubts about the department if, like the electorate and supposedly the minister, it was not told of a $4.3 billion to $5.3 billion cost blowout in one Metro project for 18 months after it was discovered.

Three years ago, Pearls and Irritations questioned whether Sydney Metro is a $40 billion deception — as Transport for NSW publications supposedly justifying the Sydney Metro in fact said the opposite. The Australian Financial Review raised a similar question about the present scheme.

What now? Tantrum or not, and irrespective of auditor-general rulings and views from the Legislative Council inquiry, the government needs to be exceptionally careful about the railway. Some candour and rigour would seem necessary. Yet the portents are, at best, mixed.

NSW submissions and evidence to the inquiry forgot to mention the (former) minister was at that moment seeking advice from the NSW transport accident (!) investigator about the scheme. That was revealed in another forum a month later.

That consulting firms such as PwC and KPMG were recruited by various bureaucracies to advise on how the scheme should work — several years after enabling legislation was passed — is bad enough.

Inveigling the accident investigator is much worse. Not merely because of repeated assurance that all safety bases are covered. Rather, accident investigators are supposed to be independent of industry arrangements — as recommended by both Glenbrook and Waterfall inquiries.

Its involvement should debar it from rail accident investigations. Reports it hedged advice compounds the folly. This situation is amazing.

NSW has a new premier and transport minister. They face the first signs of immense damage done to transport since 2011 e.g.: cessation of light rail services in Sydney’s inner west for the next 18 months; new ferries that threaten passengers with decapitation or can’t travel in more than a light chop; new trains that don’t fit tunnels/are years overdue despite being bought overseas to save time; the worst transport idea Australia has seen — Western Sydney Airport Metro.

There is little prospect of mitigating impacts if policy includes deception. The premier should establish an open public — preferably judicial — inquiry into what has been going on in transport. Then at least he’d find out.

 

Read more: https://johnmenadue.com/policy-wreck-were-being-told-two-contradictory-stories-about-nsw-trains/

 

 

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assange

off the tracks...

The New South Wales government shut down the rail network today and blame the unions for its own act of bastardry...

 

NSW's passenger train shutdown could continue into tomorrow, with unions and the state government still at loggerheads and commuters being warned to avoid rail travel.

Key points:
  • Transport for NSW said it was "impossible" to safely operate passenger services today
  • The union said workers were ready to drive trains as soon as they were allowed
  • Unions and the government will continue negotiating tonight 
 

Speaking shortly before 5pm, Sydney Trains chief executive Matt Longland — who made the decision to cancel all services today — said: "We are absolutely focused on resolving this."

"We have been at the Fair Work Commission all day today, and we will work into the evening if that's required to look at what we can do to get trains running again tomorrow across Sydney."

While he said he did not want a repeat of today's complete shutdown, Mr Longland told people to "avoid rail travel if you can" tomorrow.

Mr Longland's warning came after a day of drama on the state's train network.

Earlier, a war of words erupted between NSW's rail union and the state government, who accused each other of being behind the shutdown. 

It came after a breakdown in negotiations in the Fair Work Commission on Sunday night, when government lawyers tried to prevent the Rail, Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) taking protected industrial action today.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-21/nsw-train-strike-halts-all-passenger-services/100846938

 

 

Of course the mainstream media de mierda all blame the unions for the disruption... IT WAS THE PERROTTET GOVERNMENT THAT CLOSED DOWN YOUR NETWORK !

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...

 

 

 

BLAME PERROTTET!

Unions, and their Labor mates, were to blame for the train system in the country’s biggest city grinding to a halt without a moment’s notice, the Premier bellowed on Monday. That duplicitous duo were playing dirty politics.

Except it was his government, not the unions, who flicked the switch and remarkably turned off Sydney’s rail network as the sun was rising on a day that was meant to be about teary reunions at the city’s airport.

 

Sydney Trains made the call, after a weekend of negotiations with the Rail, Tram and Bus Union, which appeared to deliver a ceasefire, until about midnight on Sunday. Suddenly, it dawned on transport officials that there were sticking points in the agreement struck that caused them concern.

 

read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/sydney-train-shutdown-perrottet-s-monumental-political-gamble-20220221-p59yde.html

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!