It should have been obvious to all and sundry that the WestConnex was always going to be one giant colossal horky-borky-whole-sort-of-general-mish-mash. The reason why it wasn't obvious when it was proposed was that we had a tory government, with Transport Ministers, one of whom would rise to become Premier and prove that she was in fact a corrupt tory, before resigning and swanning off to join Optus and never face any real consequences whatsoever. Meanwhile, the good and fair people of New South Wales and the people of Sydney in particular, will once again spend a half century suffering from the effects of the past.
WestConnex, which cost between 2 and 4 crore dollars, has been funded mostly by private capital. Or rather, the New South Wales Government took out a series of loans, and those loans were repaid in two tranches through the mechanism of privatising the bits. In return for being the holding bucket for cheap loans, the New South Wales Government got... er... nothing of any real value until 2060. This means that as I do not have an e-Tag and hate the idea of paying tolls to drive on roads because my petrol taxes and road taxes should already do that, then I will not be allowed to go on these roads in my lifetime. In 2060 I will be 82 years old and given that the healthcare system will almost certainly be degraded due to privatisation, I suspect that I will likely be dead.
As a side note, the NSW State Government selling off the Sydney Motorways Corporation more or less paid for the Sydney Metro; which is further proof that tories can and will sell off our stuff to their tory mates if they can get away with it. This is yet another thing which should have been ours in common, which is now gone forever and is never ever coming back.
The fact that we have private roads, returning private profits, and private rewards, to the benefit of a few private people, who are able to leech off of public good, public credit, and what should be public assets, is absolutely emblematic of the City of Sydney. The land, stolen from the Eora, Gadigal, Dharug peoples et al. was taken away for the benefit of a small few; who then dumped Britain's ne'er-do-wells on the other side of the planet. That same tory class of people has not changed in 235 years and they still view the vast majority of us as either criminals or refuse to be cast aside.
So when I hear the news of traffic snarls around Balmain, Rozelle and Five Dock of a morning on the news, part of me feels a bit of schadenfreude, that this is the direct result of people wanting to avoid tolls and completely expected from an economic perspective as a toll is a barrier to entry; which is often designed to keep out the poor people. It has done precisely that. Job well done. I mean we could just remove the tolls? No? Aw well. Best of luck until 2060. You've earned it.
When face with the choice of going onto a toll road, there are some people for whom this is an opportunity cost question (about whether or not the utility of taking the road is worth paying for) but for people faced with this same choice of going onto a toll road, there is no choice at all. The toll is exclusionary. For those who can not afford to pay, private provision of services is exclusionary, and public funding of private provision of services is knavish and tory.
This is not a new argument by any stretch of the imagination. In the second ever proper economics textbook, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (1776) by Adam Smith (generally referred to by its shortened title "The Wealth of Nations"), Book V which is titled "On the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth" deals with issues that seem modern even though, they are themselves ancient arguments. By the way, Adam Smith favoured "public works" like roads, bridges, canals, harbors, the postal system, and hospitals, police and fire brigades because profit-seeking individuals could not and would not efficiently build or operate them.
Much like Smith's previous work "The Theory of Moral Sentiment" (1759), he sees the relationships of various people and actors in the economy as having obligations and duties to each other. Anyone who claims that Smith is just another mercantilist and is in favour of selfishness, is likely to have read maybe one section or one line of text.
Indeed he starts out Book V, Chapter I, Part III, with a separation of duties and obligations:
Book V: On the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth
Chapter I: On the Expenses of the Sovereign or Commonwealth
Part III: On the Expense of Public Works and Public Institutions
The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain. The performance of this duty requires, too, very different degrees of expense in the different periods of society.
- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)
Smith does not have the tools in 1776 to explain how markets work, though in the micro sense it may be possible to ascertain what happens when to parties meet. A market for a good and/or service, is really just myriad-myriad-myriad of these meetings, compiled into the aggregate, then described. However, what Smith has discovered here is that it is nominally beyond the reach of individuals or firms to build great pieces of infrastructure. A market is unable to provide such a good and/or service when this happens and it is properly a market failure. This helpfully explains why Government-owned Telstra would have built the National Fibre Optic Network by the end of 2002 at a cost fo $8bn, and why privately-owned Telstra did not and could not build it. Instead, Telstra spent almost a decade moaning like a bunch of little sooky-babies and the National Broadband Network, was completed a mere 21 years after it had been proposed.
WestConnex could never have been built without government funding for the simple reason that governments as the least risk of all persons in economies, are able to borrow monies at the cheapest rates. What WestConnex did was combine government funding, with tory desires; which is why after having had a piece of infrastructure built, they are now able to extract revenues from the people for probably beyond the scope of my lifetime.
After the public institutions and public works necessary for the defence of the society, and for the administration of justice, both of which have already been mentioned, the other works and institutions of this kind are chiefly those for facilitating the commerce of the society, and those for promoting the instruction of the people. The institutions for instruction are of two kinds: those for the education of youth, and those for the instruction of people of all ages. The consideration of the manner in which the expense of those different sorts of public, works and institutions may be most properly defrayed will divide this third part of the present chapter into three different articles.
- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)
In 1776 Adam Smith may as well have being writing science fiction here. The idea that the commonwealth should supply the things that the people ought to have because that has multiplier effects on the net good of everyone in the commonwealth, must have been completely alien to a world where some people were owned as chattel goods and could be bought and sold. This contemplates a world with public schooling and higher education and I have no doubt that Smith would have seen public health care in that same spirit.
Smith's comments here though in relation to public works, after having established that things like roads, justice, policing, defence, administration of justice et cetera, ought to be owned in common by the commonwealth. I suspect that Smith would have raged against WestConnex owning private roads for private advantage.
Article 1: On the Public Works and Institutions for facilitating the Commerce of the Society And, first, of those which are necessary for facilitating Commerce in general
In Great Britain, the abuses which the trustees have committed in the management of those tolls have in many cases been very justly complained of. At many turnpikes, it has been said, the money levied is more than double of what is necessary for executing, in the completest manner, the work which is often executed in very slovenly manner, and sometimes not executed at all. The system of repairing the high roads by tolls of this kind, it must be observed, is not of very long standing. We should not wonder, therefore, if it has not yet been brought to that degree of perfection of which it seems capable. If mean and improper persons are frequently appointed trustees, and if proper courts of inspection and account have not yet been established for controlling their conduct, and for reducing the tolls to what is barely sufficient for executing the work to be done by them, the recency of the institution both accounts and apologizes for those defects, of which, by the wisdom of Parliament, the greater part may in due time be gradually remedied.
- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)
Private entities having inherited public infrastructure, tend to be passively negligent in the maintenance of that same infrastructure now in private hands, by virtue of not wanting to pay even a pennycent for its upkeep if they can get away with it. Britain's railways after Ms Thatcher smashed them all to pieces are a classic example of this. The NHS in Britain, having suffered a thousand cuts by the Conservative Party (who actually only wish to conserve private advantage for private persons) is undergoing that same kind of neglect.
The wear and tear on roads and motorways likely isn't a whole lot but given that concrete can and does crumble when the reo-bar fades and dies, someone at some point will be up for expensive maintenance bills. Again, Smith writes science fiction in that he hopes for "courts of inspection and account" with regards public infrastructure that have not yet been established.
The money levied at the different turnpikes in Great Britain is supposed to exceed so much what is necessary for repairing the roads, that the savings, which, with proper economy, might be made from it, have been considered, even by some ministers, as a very great resource which might at some time or another be applied to the exigencies of the state. Government, it has been said, by taking the management of the turnpikes into its own hands, and by employing the soldiers, who would work for a very small addition to their pay, could keep the roads in good order at a much less expense than it can be done by trustees, who have no other workmen to employ but such as derive their whole subsistence from their wages. A great revenue, half a million perhaps, it has been pretended, might in this manner be gained without laying any new burden upon the people; and the turnpike roads might be made to contribute to the general expense of the state, in the same manner as the post office does at present.
That a considerable revenue might be gained in this manner I have no doubt, though probably not near so much as the projectors of this plan have supposed. The plan itself, however, seems liable to several very important objections.
- The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776)
Smith proposes that the revenues gained from toll-roads, if they exceed the maintenance costs, be ploughed back into the consolidated revenues of the commonwealth to contribute to the general expense of the state. In my lifetime, very tory governments from both political football teams, robbed the Commonwealth forever by selling off highly profitable quangos such as the Commonwealth Bank, Telstra, various State Banks, GIO, et cetera. To that end, my back of an envelope calculation would suggest that in my lifetime, there has been in excess of two trillion dollars of profits that could have defrayed the need for public taxation.
Private corporations care only about returning private profits to their shareholders. Whatever tolls could have been generated by WestConnex have been foregone for probably beyond my lifetime. On top of this, the permanent scarring of the road-infrastructure above, has meant that while the tolls exist, there will be permanent tailbacks on surface roads, also for probably beyond my lifetime. That means that we have private profits, built with public monies on the cheap, with permanent public nuisance.
WestConnex in their loveliness have been allowed to punch the people of Sydney in the face and keep on doing so until 2060. A permanent public nuisance and a denial of service of a road which should have been ours (and will be only given back to us in 37 years' time), has been perpetrated upon the people of Sydney. At the moment we have the Leader of the Opposition pointing fingers at the Government for allowing this, when it was in fact a previous leader of his own political football team, who still has not been thrown in prison for corruption, who allowed and caused this.
What promoted this was and article in the Australian which claimed that WestConnex is something that Adam Smith would have agreed with. I shall not link to that article because I do not wish to send that private firm which is repeatedly hostile to the idea of commonwealth, any pennycents at all.
When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776 this was set against a world of mercantilists, where people some people were owned as chattel goods and could be bought and sold and which was released when a war was being fought to retain and keep that right to own as chattel goods, after punitive taxation measures did not bring that to an end. This is before the age of mass public education and mass literacy. This is before the age of public hospitals. This is before the age of public fire brigades. This is before the age of a professional dedicated police force. Nevertheless, Smith's two books, which are now seen as being economic texts, were more in the art of political economy. Yet again we come back to the most basic questions of economics and politics.
What shall we produce?
How do we produce it?
For whom shall we produce it?
Who shall own it?
Who shall control it?
Smith's answers, as denied by the Australian, frequently advocate for the common good and common happiness of the people in commonwealth. Smith would likely have been annoyed at WestConnex, as this is just more mercantilists doing mercantilist things, for private advantage. The people of New South Wales and the people of Sydney are not allowed to have nice things because of very tory policy. That's the permanent legacy of WestConnex here. We are repeatedly not allowed to have nice things in Sydney because private people want private things at public expense, and they get away with it by yelling about the spectre of "socialism". Yes, I like some socialism; especially when it contributes to the common good and common happiness of the people in commonwealth.
I like the words of another Scotsman; who also understood the idea of commonwealth and common good.
The socialism I believe in isn’t really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it’s the way I see football and the way I see life.
- Bill Shankly, manager of Liverpool Football Club (1959-74)
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