Matthew Abraham: The ‘fake news’ document, revealed too gleefully by the Labor Opposition, isn’t fake at all
Steven Marshall is no Donald Trump but he’s showing the same shameless capacity to deny the truth, writes Matthew Abraham.
Opinion
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It was only a matter of time before our politicians nutted out that what’s good enough for Donald Trump, is good enough for them.
And so it came to pass that on Monday, Premier Steven Marshall played US President Trump’s favorite get-out-of-jail-free card. He dismissed a leaked cabinet document as “fake news”.
Fake news? Please, no, make it stop. I’ve tried putting a finger in each ear and singing “la, la, la”, just like Babe the pig, but the phrase won’t go away.
Steven Marshall is no Donald Trump, and let’s be just a little bit grateful for that.
He lacks Trump’s brilliant aggression and energy, orange hair, pathological narcissism and his ability to generate chaos out of order.
But it looks like he’s having a crack at Trump’s shameless capacity to deny the truth when it is staring him, and everyone else, in the face.
Trump has deployed the term “fake news” to discredit mainstream media, creating doubt and suspicion about stories that threaten him. It’s proved devastatingly effective and corrosive.
Now the fake news virus is spreading faster than COVID-19 in a Melbourne hotel corridor.
The “fake news” document, revealed too gleefully by the Labor Opposition, isn’t fake at all.
It’s a detailed 30-page breakdown of the options, eye-watering costings and logistics for completion of the remaining South Road section of the North South Corridor, the 10.5km stretch between Thebarton and Darlington (otherwise known as “the hard bit”).
The leaked document confirms the horror that lies ahead for this and future governments sticking their shovels into this bottomless, asphalt-lined money-pit. In brief, the Transport and Infrastructure Department document reveals the tunnel option for this South Road stretch would cost $9.9bn, roughly $1bn more than the elevated motorway option.
About 60 businesses would be forced to close and 393 homes bulldozed for the tunnels, compared to 151 businesses and 875 homes vaporised for the elevated motorway.
The Opposition seized on the possibility the project completion date could be 2033, three years later than the government’s promised 2030 timeline.
Why dismiss this as “fake news”? Anyone addicted to TV home renovation shows will know they have three constants – the job always takes far longer than expected, the budget gets blown out of the water, and the renovating couple either get divorced or have a baby, while living in a leaky caravan on site.
Putting aside marital woes or new bubs, it’d be totally unsurprising if an almost $10bn, hideously complex road project with a 10-year completion date came in on budget and on time.
Did the Darlington Interchange finish on budget and on schedule? Nope, it didn’t.
What’s surprising is the tunnel option, with dramatically less disruption to businesses and residents, is costed at only $1bn more than the elevated motorway. What’s a billion among friends? The tunnel option sounds like a no-brainer.
Without doubt, somebody deep inside the Government’s own bunker wanted this information out in the public arena, and that should be a concern for the Premier and his newly-anointed Transport Minister, Corey Wingard. Someone is weeing inside the tent.
It looks like a recent background paper, not a final sign-off by any stretch, no doubt feeding into the prolonged cabinet argy-bargy about the road.
The timing of the leak kicks the legs out from under what was surely poised to be a major plank of the November 10 state budget, a COVID-smashed budget that will need all the good news it can find.
Long before Trump invented fake news, the late Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen would brush away awkward questions about his dodgy government with a condescending “don’t you worry about that”. That phrase summed up the belief that governments always know what’s best for us. They often don’t.
The leaked departmental paper is the sort of document governments get to see all the time, but we don’t.
Why shouldn’t the public have access to a free flow of factual information about a project they’ll be paying off for generations?
Instead, we’re served up sanitised versions of the truth after the government’s army of spin doctors has plastered lipstick on the pig. Don’t you worry about that. That’s the true definition of fake news.
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