Matthew Abraham: What if they’d made the entire North-South Corridor a privately built toll road and spent the $8.9bn on something interesting or, heaven forbid, exciting?

What if we’d taken a different route and let private business take the North-South Corridor, writes Matthew Abraham.

Anyone who’s ever tried to dig a hole in Adelaide’s hard-baked clay knows it always ends in a world of pain.

Over four weeks now, I’ve been helping wage hand-to-hand combat with the roots of a nuisance tree that refuses to let go of Mother Earth.

We’ve dug down and around the stump, attacking it with a pick and shovel, an axe, a cordless demolition saw and then a 2m-long fettlers’ crowbar used on railway tracks.

Finally, we called the heavy artillery – a jackhammer. My fillings are still vibrating but the stump remains unmoved. It’s not the slightest bit wobbly. Have you ever seen a grown man cry?

Multiply this pain 1000 times and you’re still nowhere close to the political and budget grief that’s in store as the Marshall Government embarks on its $8.9bn two-tunnel solution for the River Torrens to Darlington section of South Road, the missing link of the North-South Corridor.

Labor MP Tom Koutsantonis. Picture: Brenton Edwards

Pull up a chair, South Australia, this is going to be fun.

The project is the centrepiece of the COVID budget unveiled on Tuesday, a document that will see SA take an unprecedented gamble into the great unknown, with state debt projected to soar from $17.5bn today to $33.2bn in 2023-24.

When pressed on the debt issue in parliament this week, Premier Steven Marshall said he was following Reserve Bank and Treasury advice to “go for broke in terms of borrowing money”.

Seizing on this, Labor’s Tom Koutsantonis tweeted: “No kidding, the Wok in a Box voodoo continues.” Koutsantonis is like a dog with a bone when it comes to the Premier’s long-past, hardly scandalous investment in the takeaway noodle caper.

Still, the Premier could have chosen his words better, because the small print of the budget papers shows that’s precisely where things are headed.

SA’s ratio of net debt to revenue – the money the state earns to service debt – was 30 per cent last year, it’s 52 per cent now and will hit an alarming 104 per cent by 2024. This is not good.

Something tells me we’ll overshoot the $33bn debt by a few more billion come 2023-24. Let’s round it off to a neat $40bn.

So, full marks to Treasurer Rob Lucas for trying to shave a few billion off the Torrens to Darlington link by choosing a shandy of two tunnels linked by surface and lowered roads.

This will send fewer businesses broke, mean fewer compulsory acquisitions of homes and commercial properties, and preserve the heritage-listed Thebarton Theatre and the Queen of Angels church, where Frank Pangallo MLC was baptised, making it a holy westie shrine.

But it’s an hilariously complicated solution. Take a deep breath and fasten your seatbelts.

Stage 1 will see a kilometre of surface and lowered motorway from the Darlington Interchange to the start of the southern tunnel that’ll run 4.3km, ending just south of the Glenelg tram line, then another kilometre of lowered motorway under the tram line and Anzac Highway.

Stage 2 will be 2km of surface motorway from the Gallipoli Underpass to just south of Richmond Road, then lowered motorway under Richmond Road to the northern tunnel just south of Sir Donald Bradman Drive.

Motorists will then enter 2km of northern tunnel ending just south of West Thebarton Road and emerge on to 1.1km of lowered motorway under West Thebarton Road until south of the River Torrens and then surface roadway to tie in with the completed Torrens-to-Torrens corridor.

It sounds like the Mad Mouse on steroids. All this for a “non-stop motorway” that’ll be chockers with B-doubles lugging heavy freight.

When I asked Lucas in the budget lockup did he, at any stage of the budget process, think he could spend that $8.9bn in a better way, he replied “the answer to that question is no”.

He says the North-South Corridor has been earmarked as the state’s single most important infrastructure project since about 2013.

It’s a pity this government, and the previous Rann-Weatherill governments, haven’t seriously asked the “what if” question. What if they’d made the entire North-South Corridor a privately built toll road and spent the $8.9bn on something interesting or, heaven forbid, exciting?

Instead, we’re going for broke, as the Premier puts it. Once you’ve dug yourself into a hole, there’s no turning back.