Just get on with building the Metro West project

Three months after Premier Chris Minns cast doubt over its viability, the future of the Metro West rail project is expected to be made clear this week. It’s about time.

Stoking such uncertainty was entirely unnecessary because it seems clear the NSW Labor government will stick with the massive project and was probably always going to. For Minns and his ministers, the real decisions are how to fund a budget blowout, as well as finalising the construction phase and station locations.

Metro West hangs by a thread as the premier awaits a review of the project.

Alarmed by the likely cost overruns, the newly elected Labor government asked the former head of the federal Department of Infrastructure, Mike Mrdak, and former deputy director of Queensland’s Department of Transport, Amanda Yeates, to review the city’s Metro strategy and report back.

Taking stock of the project was reasonable but outsourcing the future of Australia’s largest public transport project to two unelected former bureaucrats could easily be interpreted as weak leadership, particularly when Minns and his team repeatedly promised to stick with Metro West ahead of the election.

Proposed by the former Coalition government in late 2016, the 24-kilometre rail line will snake underground between Hunter Street in the CBD to Westmead in the city’s west, stopping at Pyrmont, the emerging Bays district near Anzac Bridge, Five Dock, Burwood North, North Strathfield, Sydney Olympic Park and Parramatta. Originally budgeted at $16 billion, Minns has spent the past few months warning the total bill could exceed $25 billion.

Despite construction being well under way, Sydney Metro chief executive Peter Regan has said extra stations could be added to Metro West but it would have “time and cost implications”.

“Any material change to the alignment does have an impact. It’s not simply a matter of just moving the machine over a little bit and tunnelling in a different direction,” he told a parliamentary inquiry a week ago.

Regan said an extra station would also likely add about three to four minutes to the journey time, which from Parramatta to the Sydney CBD is about 20 minutes under the plans approved for the project under the previous government.

The Herald has been a strong proponent of Metro West and argued strongly against delay or cancellation. The project will transform public transport in an already overstretched part of the network and open up enormous housing development opportunities.

Metro West is one of many major infrastructure projects underway across Sydney. Some, such as the massive WestConnex interchange beneath Rozelle and the new 15.5 kilometre Metro line linking Chatswood to Sydenham (with new stations or platforms Crows Nest, North Sydney, Barangaroo, Martin Place, Pitt Street, Waterloo, and Central) are months away from opening. Construction is also underway on the Western Harbour Tunnel and Warringah Freeway upgrade.

Sydney is worthy of such city-defining projects. They are going to reshape the way we live, work and play for generations to come. But the reality is they will be opened by a Labor government which opposed the privatisation agenda which allowed the then-Coalition government to fund them.

Having ruled out any future privatisation, Labor must now work out how to pay for Metro West.

While the Coalition had planned high density housing above the new underground stations, Minns is right in pointing out the lack of a coherent strategy for higher density in the vicinity surrounding the new hubs. A policy change which imposes higher density limits surrounding the stations and potentially captures some of the resulting land value increases to help pay for the project would make sense. But did we really need a three-month review to tell us this?

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