Vikki Campion: Voters have no idea what’s at risk — because pollies play safe

If Labor gets wins a majority, millions of dollars spent on feasibility studies, planning and designs will be wasted and communities which have fought for safer roads and better dams will be back to square one, writes Vikki Campion.

In their desire to be inoffensive, politicians of major parties have become nebulous in their lines to the camera.

As seen in Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria, being all things to all people is an excellent tactic for keeping the Liberals and Nationals out of government.

Ample material that the NSW Coalition should have been smashing NSW Labor with during the last days of the campaign was ignored.

Whether they were unaware of it, or whether the tactical luminaries that float around harbour-view offices on fat salaries enjoying flash dinners — well-versed in losing elections — were telling candidates to stick to inane motherhood statements, is up for conjecture.

Why weren’t they smashing Labor over their planned cuts to regional infrastructure disclosed by the independent Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) rather than suggesting new ties for media doorstops?

Chris Minns has kept quiet on his intentions about raising the Warragamba Dam wall while submitting costings for abandoning the project. Picture: NCA NewsWire

Disclosed costings from the PBO reveal that Labor’s premier group — as represented in independent audits — are public servants and where they will get the money for them is slashing infrastructure in seats they do not intend to compete in.

For NSW to stay the “premier state”, it needs premier infrastructure across the whole state not just under the surface of Sydney.

The Liberals have lost vital opportunities to call out Labor over their policies and costings in the final days of the campaign. Picture: NCA Newswire

Perversely, the Liberals and Nationals had allocated money to build dams and roads — PBO documents show that Labor plans to cut that — but that has hardly been on high volume in the campaign’s last days.

Even in Sydney, Labor has costed a policy called “Cancel Warragamba Dam wall raising”.

Labor’s submission to the PBO says cancelling Warragamba Dam has not been publicly released with the intended implementation date “upon formation of government”.

Labor leader Chris Minns denied in debates he would knock off the wall-raising project but his party considers it necessary enough to cost it as an unannounced policy to quietly land on an independent auditor’s website this week.

Juxtapose this with their policy to uncap public sector wages and pay for remuneration with “productivity gains” — according to the PBO, a move that will cost taxpayers $2.6bn more over the next three years.

Without adequate water supplies and control, there’s no food, jobs and future to discuss. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

There’s the money for Warragamba Dam.

Without water, there is no food, no jobs and no future but NSW Labor has also costed a policy to cancel building the New Dungowan Dam in Tamworth, one of the fastest growing cities in NSW.

There was no announcement made, it was just quietly slipped through.

Minns was never held to account in a debate about it and never had the fortitude to go to a press conference and say he would do it. It didn’t suit the theme of running through a sunlit park with smiley friends.

Without the new dam, one of the most dangerous old dams in NSW still needs to be repaired. Unless you can convert Minns’s charisma to water, it won’t be much help in feeding us come to the next drought.

It’s not just water infrastructure projects to be cancelled on a Labor win, according to their policies lodged with the PBO.

Labor has costed “pausing” lifesaving work to the Central Section of the Great Western Highway “saving $1.1bn” which the PBO found “would likely lead to increased costs when the project starts again”. Possibly even more money for public servants.

Labor has costed cancelling the Murwillumbah Education Campus and capping Labor’s regional road fund to $334m for hundreds of thousands of kilometres of roads in NSW. That would not get close to building one bypass around one middle-sized town.

NSW Labor will be like federal Labor, which slashed $2.4bn from state hospital funding in the October budget, along with millions in allocated funding wiped from dam projects, gas infrastructure and critical mineral exploration and mining.

Meanwhile, financing for mobile black spots is now going almost exclusively to Labor seats.

The only reason that 20 per cent of voters are “undecided” is that they have zero idea what either party stands for and each party is determined to attract them by showing little substance. In Minns’s case, by playing with native marsupials in front of the cameras.

If Labor gets to win nine seats to land a majority — and everyone from commentators to the betting agents seem to agree it will — not only will millions of dollars spent on feasibility studies, planning and designs be wasted but the communities that fought for safer roads and better dams for upcoming droughts will be back to square one.

Instead of fighting Labor, the NSW Coalition has developed an unnecessary devotion to stopping the Climate-200 Teals, forgetting the Tiffany’s-coloured “independents” are not that popular — the only seat in NSW where the Teals had a higher vote than the Liberals at a federal level was Warringah.

This is despite the Teals spending $2.12m in Wentworth, $2.12m in Kooyong, $1.5m each in Mackellar and Goldstein, $1.3m in North Sydney, making their cheapest seat Curtin with a $973,224 spend.

But in NSW, ring-fenced by laws preventing the very rich from undue political influence, I highly doubt the state will be held to account by a new cohort of Louis Vuitton soccer mums.

Independents running for the NSW Legislative Assembly are capped at $198,700 in spending – just 10 per cent of what the federal Teals spent from the largesse of their fairy godmothers, notably tax-dodging CEOs, green-energy traders, heirs and heiresses.

In NSW, third-party campaigners such as Climate 200, which alone spent $12.9m on the federal election, are capped at spending $1.2m.

Buying your seat is much harder when donations and political expenditure is restricted.

If we don’t know who has won NSW by Saturday night, it’s because tacticians of major parties, distracted by the Climate 200 “independents”, stopped elected politicians — apart from Matt Kean – from articulating what they really believe.

NSW will be poorer for it.