Despite scarcely rating a mention in the leaders' debate, public transport is clearly a crucial issue in this month's Victorian election.
It might be an exaggeration to say, as Paul Mees did in The Drum this month, that community discontent is at ''fever pitch'', but concern is clearly sufficient to create the impression that Labor may be one major meltdown of the rail system away from losing its majority in the November 27 election.
This makes quite a contrast with the situation when Labor came to power in Victoria 11 years ago. In the 1999 election campaign, public transport in Melbourne scarcely rated a mention. This fact is made more striking when one considers that the handover of Melbourne's train and tram services to private operators occurred just as the campaign was getting underway.
Paradoxically, public transport in regional Victoria played a crucial part in determining government in 1999. Two of the seats which the Coalition lost, Gippsland East and Ripon, were ones in which, early in its term, the Kennett government had removed rail services. After the 1999 election, it was revealed that Jeff Kennett had rejected a recommendation from his transport minister and treasurer to restore the rails services to these communities thereby passing up what seemed an obvious opportunity to demonstrate that more efficient delivery of existing services could free up funds for additional services.
Meanwhile, the more politically nimble Labor opposition not only pledged to restore axed rural services, but also promised fast trains to several regional centres. They costed these at the ludicrously low figure of $80 million. By the following year, the now Labor government admitted the actual cost would be $556 million, while the final cost ended up blowing out to more than $750 million.
Eleven years on, the political geography of public transport has largely been reversed. All the high-profile public transport issues in Victoria relate to metropolitan Melbourne. In their early years in power, Labor devoted most of its energy and financial resources to delivering its costly regional rail project and was content to let the metropolitan area slide along; happily having the best of both worlds, taking credit for any successes, and blaming any failures on what they claimed was the flawed model of privatisation they had inherited.
What eventually forced the Government's focus to shift to the city was a massive patronage boom which has seen metropolitan train patronage almost double in the past few years. This massive rise in usage was triggered by a combination of external factors (such as rising fuel prices and population growth) and the improved services provided by the private operators.
Critics of privatisation, such as Mees, tried to argue that all the patronage growth was solely the result of the external factors. The flaw in this argument was that it did not explain why Melbourne experienced much quicker patronage growth than the other Australian cities which still labored under their government-run services.
The second claim of the critics was that the privatised system was actually costing taxpayers more money than the old Public Transport Corporation had. While it is true that privatisation has failed to meet the bullish financial projections of the early bidders, it is clear that on a like-for-like basis, the service is certainly not costing more. Of course, expenditure on public transport has now increased. However, that is because the Government has had to start spending capital so the system can cope with the vastly increased numbers of passengers it is now carrying.
Also much of the criticism of the private operation of services in the past decade has failed to recognize just how bad things often were before the Kennett-era reforms. Lengthy strikes were just one aspect of public transport in the past. The system was nowhere near as rosy as some of the nostalgic now claim.
Fortunately, despite its earlier rhetoric, the current Government belatedly recognised that privatisation had virtue. It chose to re-tender, rather than re-nationalise, when the existing contracts expired last year. Ironically, one of the comments posted in response to Mees' Drum piece was that Melbourne should learn from Hong Kong as well as Zurich, the poster of the comment apparently being unaware that, since the most recent re-tendering, the operator in Melbourne is actually MTR from Hong Kong.
The oddest part of the critique of Melbourne's transport is the assertion that the key feature it most lacks is a single authority to oversee all public transport in the city. There is an almost touching belief that, if such a body were created, the same bureaucrats currently derided for incompetence will overnight become fonts of all wisdom. Zurich undoubtedly has an excellent public transport system. However, the thought that a model from the unique Swiss political environment will automatically be a panacea in Australia stretches credulity.
While the two major parties differ on aspects of public transport policy, both at least now understand that private operators need to be part of the picture. Yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Greens have swallowed whole the position of Mees and other critics. Not only are they promising an extensive list of uncosted new public transport projects, they are also vigorously spruiking the single authority model.
However, more seriously, the Greens have said they will tear up the contracts with the private operators. Not only would this be a retrograde step for public transport but, by its violation of the principle of sovereign risk.
It hardly sounds like a proposal that would hold much appeal in a great capitalist city like Zurich.
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