Australian Financial Review, 5 August 2013 by Mathew Dunckley

Not far from where I live there’s a little nook of a street, barely a lane wide, with glass-smooth asphalt and beautiful bluestone gutters. It was beautified under the federal Roads to Recovery program, which tipped several hundred thousand dollars into this little-travelled corner of suburbia.

It’s also a tree-lined monument to the absolute dog’s breakfast that infrastructure spending has become.

So where to begin with Melbourne’s East West Link, a project that is tying state and federal politicians of both stripes in knots?

Well let’s start with Rod Eddington. The business supremo was asked by the Labor state government to look at congestion in the city and came back with two big answers – an 18-kilometre road starting at the end of the Eastern Freeway and linking to the Western Ring Road and a 19-kilometre underground railroad. He thus planted the seeds for one of the most farcical debates in recent history. Continue Reading…