AN ABIDING Mainlanders’ cliché about Tasmania and Tasmanians is the one to do with mental slowness, lethargy and a Hicksvillian approach to life, often summed up in jibes about kissin’-cousins and bi-cephalism, although dissing the latter seems at odds with the almost-universal proverb about two being better than one.

We — and after three years of paying local rates and taxes, one has surely started to pay one’s dues — have one word to share with fellow Tasmanians as a rejoinder to insults from the North Island: trains.

When the Reece government sold Tasmania’s railways to the Whitlam government in 1974, some interpreted it as a smart move: good, get rid of the bloody things, bloody trains holding us up at level crossings. Ultimately, for this minor deliverance, we’ve ended up with log trucks running us off our roads.

Others sounded notes of caution: why hand over a local item of infrastructure, a source of jobs and industry, to a set of desk-jockeys in far-off Canberra, who wouldn’t know a Western Junction from a Bridgewater wye link. Surrendering decision-making power to remote bureaucrats, it was argued, is almost always a Very Bad Idea, an attitude that has been mightily re-inforced this month by voters in France and The Netherlands rejecting further centralisation of the EU.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that decision over three decades ago, consider this: 180 years after the world’s first railway — the George Stephenson’s Stockton & Darlington Railway — opened in NE England, Sydney and Melbourne, the places in Australia with the nation’s biggest collections of know-alls and experts, consultants and facilitators, have possibly the most dysfunctional rail networks in the OECD.

In Sydney, it’s quicker to “drive” your car at 7.6 km/h along Parramatta Road at peak hour than to catch a train on the corresponding line: at least, barring the nocturnal activities of car thieves, you know your car will be there for you in the a.m. You quickly give up waiting on a station platform listening to a series of garbled “just-off-the-boat” announcements about the latest ten cancellations. That, of course, is on a good day — the bad days have no announcements at all, and just for a bit of commuting S&M, three half-full trains that don’t bother stopping.

But, whatever the woes inflicted on Sin City commuters by erudite Mr Carr, Nice Mr Bracks and his squad would seem to be well ahead for the Blackadder/Baldrick Cunning Plan Award.

Think of all the whinges you’ve ever made about getting around this Island: roads with bloody reverse cambers, too narrow, soft shoulders, bloody log trucks, speed limit changes every mile or so, near-invisible line-markings, bastard log trucks, meaningless signs [“To C 3842”], PATMs*, and, not to forget, those effin’ Gunns loggernauts.

Now, get yourself worked up recalling some of the dumbest decisions taken by state governments and local councils — you’d reckon none elsewhere could be so silly ? You could try imagining DIER ripping up the inbound lanes of Hobart’s Brooker Highway or Launceston’s Southern Outlet to reduce those arterials to single carriageways. Nah, they wouldn’t dare, would they ? No-one’d be so utterly stupid, surely ??

A good laugh

Well, settle yourself down for a good laugh after reading this:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Fastrail-bid-a-shambles-claim-advisers/2005/06/11/1118347630062.html

Yes, you read it right, and no, the news item has not been “doctored”: Nice Mr Bracks’ government has improved Victoria’s country rail by reducing double track to single, and has managed to produce a 21st century self-styled Fast Train that is slower than the 20th century one it is replacing !! With — hold your breath — a cost over-run of about 940%.

There has to a prize somewhere in the world for that kind of achievement, don’t you think ? One like the annual Darwin Awards, which, if you’re not au fait with The Australian Skeptics, are given to those erstwhile members of the human race who’ve improved and deepened the gene pool by taking themselves out of it before passing on theirs.

But, not to be outdone by “Mexicans” from south-of-the-Murray, perhaps New South Welshpersons have done their bit for this putative award. Apart from building Sydney’s number one dam in a rain shadow at a time when rainfall stats showed a historic 50 years of low precipitation, clever Mr Carr — Australia’s answer to your average Paris rive-gauche intellectual** — managed to deliver a new set of trains so potent that they drained so much power from the system as to shut it down, and were too wide for some double tracks, bridges and tunnels. Millennium Trains they are called — there’s a lesson there, somewhere, isn’t there ?

Alan Bullock and Stephen Trombley’s New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought tells us [p 530] that Millenarianism refers to the “practices of those who seek … a comprehensive salvationary solution for social, personal and political predicaments”. Just building these trains to fit the existing permanent way would have been “comprehensive” and “salvationary” enough, don’t you reckon ? Besides, those “Mexicans” had done something similar in the 90s — buying double-decker carriages as a quick fix to over-crowding at peak hour, only to find afterwards that they’d fit on only two lines. You’d think that sending some blokes in blunnies with the space age equivalent of a tape measure would’ve obviated all that grief, wouldn’t you ?

Which brings us round to the m-word.

Most responsible and aware house owners know that if maintenance is neglected, the cumulative impact*** can be destructive. Yet public sector, utilities and infrastructure maintenance seems more honoured by negligence than observance. Do these incompetent and neglectful managers treat their own personal properties in the same way? Why does the obvious become so invisible ?

Douglas A Robertson, of Manly, NSW, reckons he has an answer.

In a Letter to the Editor to The Australian, Fri 17 June 05, Robertson traced the root cause back to the 1980s.

Roman roads

According to figures he cited from the Barton Group, Australia’s spending on infrastructure fell from 4% of GDP in the 80s to 0.5% just recently. Robertson claims that corporatisation of government statutory bodies transferred “responsibilities for planning and decision-making from public service technocrats, engineers, scientists, professionals and so on to federal and state government corporations managed by ministers.

“At least the technocrats knew how to run railways, water boards … more effectively than the 100 or so ministers that now manage all things”.

[His claim brings to mind Roman roads that are still in use today: they were planned, built and maintained by the military arm of the government of the Roman Senate and People.]

Perhaps there are several potentially very useful theses here for some of our brightest minds at UTAS [the institution that used call itself the University of Tasmania, before it renamed itself on the VicPoo and TasSick model], and at other tertiary institutions of higher learning: here are two for starters:

(i) why do Major Projects so often have cost over-runs by multiples of up to five, or eight or ten ? Surely (a) there’s enough cumulative experience around to provide reasonable guesstimates, and (b) no government actually looks forward to the opprobrium of “Yes, we did promise a cost of 35 million dollars, but it’s now up to 285 million — sorry about that”.

(ii) are the inefficiencies of today any different in kind or scale [or both] from those of yesterday ? Or is it that there’s more media coverage than before, and Joe and Joanna Voter now much more aware of these deficiencies?

Exactly what are the root causes of so much bureaucratic and managerial stupidity? Are those whose low level of talent used to place them in ditch-digging and stitch-sewing now running the works? Are all the asylums now being run by the lunatics? Or does it just look that way ?

Is the hindsight of Mr Robertson of Manly, NSW, simply rose-tinted ?

PS: Do not mention that gas pipeline near Hobart that had to be dug up because the trenches were too shallow.

Colquhoun 7248

* Police Activated Tax Machines
** and always keep in mind that Poll Pot was one of them
*** An instance where “impact” actually works better than “effect”