Will the press gallery ever write about inland rail properly?

Today the federal government announced a review, to be led by Kerry Schott, into the inland rail project. Infrastructure Minister Catherine King described the project as “over budget, behind schedule and with no plan for where it will start or end”.

There’s no review needed for the inland rail project. It should simply be stopped, immediately. Every single dollar spent on it is wasted and will never be recouped. That’s not personal opinion. That’s the original business case (now curiously hard to find on any government site) — a business case prepared when the project was going to cost $5 billion to build. It’s since blown out to $15 billion, and Barnaby Joyce committed the Coalition to waste another $5 billion (at least) extending it to Gladstone.

It’s a massive white elephant. Except, that’s a smear on pachyderms. To call it a dog is to demean our canine friends. The inland rail line won’t just lay there rusting in the countryside. Its whole purpose is to subsidise coal exports by offering below-cost rail transport for coal miners — 35% below cost, according to the agency building it, the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC). The ARTC has said it quite clearly: “access charges have been set to maximise rail volumes rather than to maximise financial revenue”. The extension to Gladstone is also designed to subsidise coal exports out of Gladstone.

But when David Crowe, handed a drop by King about the review, came to inform readers about the review today, none of that was mentioned (to be fair to Crowe, no other press gallery journalist has ever covered the thing properly, either). The only indirect reference was Barnaby Joyce claiming that Labor might not open more coal mines (we wish). Indeed, Crowe referred to the project as replacing “thousands of trucks on major highways”.

There’ll be no thousands of trucks replaced. What there’ll be is taxpayer-subsidised coal trains giving fossil fuel companies a handout, which was always the point of the inland rail project in the first place.

You’d think a $20 billion subsidy to the Coalition’s coal miner donors would be of interest to journalists, but evidently not.