The federal government is being urged to pull funding from the controversial $1.6bn Perth freight link and redirect the money towards a cash-starved light rail proposal after the West Australian premier, Colin Barnett, confirmed he had shelved the second stage of the road project for at least 12 months.
Peter Newman, a Curtin University academic who has been asked by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, for advice on building public transport, said he doubted the second stage of the road would be built.
“There is no way in the world that stage two will ever happen,” he said.
After 18 months of defending the freight link, Barnett said on Sunday that the second phase of the proposed road, which has been criticised as rushed and unplanned, would not be approved “in the forthcoming period” because it was “more complex than anticipated, and more expensive”.
He declined to say how long it would be delayed.
“We have not made even a decision on the route or the types of investments that would be made,” he said.
Instead, he said, WA would focus its infrastructure spending in the next 12 months on building the first stage of the freight link, a 5km stretch of freeway known as Roe 8, a train line past Perth airport and the Swan Valley bypass.
But Newman, who has previously described the freight link as a “waste of public money”, said the change of federal leadership gave the WA government the opportunity to rethink its priorities and focus on light rail investment, including Perth’s stalled $2.5bn MAX project.
“I blame Tony Abbott as much as the state government because he threw money at infrastructure projects, they had to be shovel-ready quite quickly, and [the freight link] was what they came up with overnight,” he told Guardian Australia.
Newman did not expect Turnbull to fund infrastructure in that manner. He had spoken to Turnbull and the cities minister, Jamie Briggs, about light rail, and suggested those projects could be funded by private sector developers who would capitalise on the increase in land values around light rail stops and stations.
“It was quite clear that there’s not a lot of funding around but we have a lot of people who want to see light rail happen,” he said. “Those that come up with the most private money are likely to get the most federal funding.”
The Perth freight link was announced in the Abbott government’s first budget and was granted $925m in federal funding.
The plan was to build a link for heavy freight trucks from the Kwinana freeway through Perth’s southern suburbs to the Fremantle port, but the final 1.5km of the road, including a tricky river crossing, has not been mapped out.
It sparked protests in April when the government warned it might compulsorily acquire more than 77 homes and businesses near the proposed route.
Without the second stage of the freight link, the Roe 8 extension will draw the existing Roe highway into the heart of Perth’s southern suburbs, through the internationally recognised Beeliar wetlands.
Plans for the Roe 8 extension are no less controversial. A group named Save the Beeliar Wetlands has filed an application with the supreme court for a judicial review of the environmental approval process, and protesters surrounded Barnett when he announced the winning contractor for the extension on site last week.
A statement from the state transport minister in May said the contract for stage two was due to be awarded next month. Three construction consortiums had been working on detailed planning proposals and feasibility studies.
Briggs told Fairfax radio station 6PR in Perth on Monday that the federal government expected the whole project to be delivered as agreed.
“It is a dangerous thing for state governments to do, to get into the business of chopping and changing on projects,” Briggs said, citing “the damage to Victoria’s international reputation” from that state’s decision to drop the east-west link toll road.
“We sign these agreements in good faith and we will pay as these agreements are met.”
Federal Labor MP Alannah MacTiernan, who quashed the Roe 8 development when she was state transport minister, said the federal government should pull funding from the road and redirect it to rail projects.
“This has been a project that has not been planned, and all of the unravelling of this project that we’re seeing here today is a result of the fact that this was a political project, this wasn’t a carefully prepared infrastructure project,” she said.
Speaking at a site along the 22km proposed light rail route in Perth on Monday, MacTiernan said the entire freight link project – stages one and two – should be abandoned and the money put back into the light rail project, which has been pushed back three years due to lack of funds.
“You can’t plan in the way they’ve done it,” she said. “A couple of ministers got together, dreamt up this plan, it appeared in the budget, and ever since then people have been playing catch-up trying to get this project to work.
“The project was a farce from the beginning, but building half a farcical project doesn’t make it more sensible.”
