Media release: Labor makes a meal of the costings for Port Botany

The Port Botany Rail Line is a good project – unfortunately Labor has got key details wrong and its announced funding of $175 million is less than half of what is required to deliver it.

Once again Mr Shorten and Mr Albanese are showing they simply do not have the basic managerial competence required to meet Australia’s infrastructure needs.

A strategic estimate for the cost of the Port Botany Railway Line, provided to the Turnbull Government earlier this year in discussions with the NSW Government, is $300 million.

Labor has failed to understand the need to integrate this project with proposed express road connections to the Sydney Airport and Port – the Sydney Gateway component of the WestConnex project.

Port Botany rail connections and the Airport Gateway were part of WestConnex business case released last year and assessed by Infrastructure as a high priority. Surely Mr Albanese would have had the chance to read the publicly released business case?

Yet the amount of money Labor has allocated is much too little to get the job done.

In fact the problem is even worse because Labor claims in its announcement that its money will also be sufficient to fund a completely separate project – a crossing loop at Warwick Farm in Sydney’s West.

The estimated cost of that project is $100 million.

This means the true bill for the work Labor wants to do is estimated to be $400 million.

Labor is offering less than half of this.

It’s like someone offering to buy you dinner – but then only coming up with enough cash to cover the entrée and the garlic bread.

Once again Labor cannot get the basic financial details right – they’ve really made a meal of this one.