Billions and billions served

So. We’re spending [a billion dollars](http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23154161-661,00.html)  on a ticketing system that we don’t need, and which [may be delayed for the third time](http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/minister-defends-ticketing-delay/2008/02/04/1201973793535.html)  .

We’re spending another half billion dollars on dredging the bay to accommodate more shipping containers that we have no infrastructure to support. This will likely result in spending ten billion dollars on a kinda-proposed tunnel under a couple of parks and a graveyard because of all the increased truck traffic. I’m not even considering the environmental impact of all this stuff. Total cost of useless projects? Eleven and a half billion dollars. Based on a population of about five million people, it’s $2300 per Victorian. That’s madness.

Note that most of the world’s biggest ports are moving out of the cities that gave birth to them. The land is worth too much to use for industrial purposes, and there’s no room for expansion.

Elect me! I will:

* Move the bloody port to Hastings, which has a naturally deep channel, decent rail connections, and room to expand. Fewer trucks on the roads in Melbn, hence no tunnel required.

* Cancel the damn ticketing system and spend that money on building more train lines to suburbs that don’t have them. Hell, for all that money, the trains could run for free: 170 million trips a year at $3.50/trip means that 11.5 billion dollars buys us free trains for nearly 20 years. There wouldn’t be any expansion happening, but I don’t see any happening right now anyway.

I don’t see how these two things could end up costing more than 11.5 billion dollars, really. We could build ourselves a very nice port and upgrade the train system quite well for $11,500,000,000. No tunnel required.

Doesn’t take much of a visionary to see that, Brumby.