Yes Gus, more blatant porking by the rattus mob …..

Failed public servant David MacCormack writes on Crikey:

Nats add Pacific Highway to regional porkbarrel

The Federal Government's expected announcement today of funding to upgrade the Pacific Highway is a massive handout to two of Australia's most lavishly rewarded interest groups – regional communities and the trucking industry.

No one will be caught dead criticising it though. A dual-carriage Pacific Highway is up there with motherhood in the Australian political lexicon – one of the reasons why it has been announced and re-announced so often in the last 20 years.

Millions of interstate tourists have used this route over the decades, leading to massive attention to its death toll. However, most of the total volume of traffic on the Highway is local usage by regional residents, and heavy vehicle freight movements. So while the headlines will focus on the "horror highway" aspect of cutting tourist death and injury, nearly all the benefit of over $2 billion of taxpayer money will go to trucking companies and the series of increasingly-marginal electorates along the NSW Central and North coasts.

And who holds most of these electorates? You guessed it, the master practitioners of pork barrelling and market distortion, the Nationals - including Mark Vaile, the Transport Minister himself. And let's not forget Richmond, carelessly lost by Larry Anthony in 2004, which the Nats are eager to seize back from Labor. You can add this money to the billions wasted in drought relief, gold-plated rural infrastructure and massive regional assistance programs already leached from taxpayers by this mob.

The upgrade funding comes from the Government's "Auslink" program, purportedly a "National Land Transport Plan" focussed on "linking transport performance outcomes to projected economic growth and development". In fact, like everything the Nats touch, it is a massive slush fund, in which politicians get to decide where funding goes.

And it goes mostly on roads. A token amount of money was allocated to rail upgrades, but the route to Brisbane remains a single-track, single-stack relic of the mid-twentieth century with long transit times and poor reliability. This hasn't stopped Mark Vaile wasting money studying an "inland rail route" pushed by his colleagues and various white shoe brigaders, even though a substantial upgrade of the current Sydney-Brisbane rail line would slow the remorseless increase in heavy vehicle usage along the Highway. As always, however, the trucking industry is altogether more powerful than its poor cousins in rail. A dual-carriage Pacific Highway will be a dream come true for the road transport industry.

When John Anderson – who unlike his successor, actually has a brain – was Transport Minister, he flagged the possibility of using tolls to accelerate the upgrade of the Highway, particularly for heavy vehicle and tourist users. This would have made eminent sense, permitting faster construction while requiring users to pay for the expensive infrastructure they were travelling on, and enabling some attempt to capture the massive externalities inflicted on the community by motorists and truckies.

The toll idea has now apparently vanished - it doesn't make for good Daily Telegraph headlines, and the road transport companies would object. So it's taxpayers – yet again – who will paying for the noxious effect of the National Party on Australian government.