In my travels around the country over the last few months I’ve encountered some massive roadworks projects. It seems that hundreds of millions of dollars are being miss-spent. For example; the total rebuilding of the Bruce Highway over a long distance south of Tully or the massive new bridge over the Mulgrave River south of Cairns, seem unnecessary. Surely that enormous amount of money could be much better spent elsewhere.

Rudd is embarking on a major policy of nation building, under these categories:

• Education and Research
• Health and Hospitals
• Transport and Communications.
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http://www.alp.org.au/media/1008/msinfrpm140.php

So… doesn’t health and education and the like take priority over unnecessary highway upgrades? What about projects that will take us away from our dependence on constant expansionism and towards national sustainability? The priorities seem to be askew.

Rudd’s nation building project key assessment criteria are:

How does a project expand Australia’s productivity capacity?
How does it build Australia’s global competitive advantages?
How does it develop our cities or our regions?
How does it reduce greenhouse gas emissions?
How does it improve our quality of life? “

http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Speech/2008/speech_0524.cfm

Well…SURELY quality of life comes first. And SURELY it is time to STOP expanding Australia’s productivity capacity, or at least start slowing it down towards a steady state.

It seems that the whole nation building thing is based on the same old mantra of maximised continuous growth which, along with Rudd’s super-high immigration rate, is NOT going to improve our average quality of life, but IS going to take us forever further away from a sustainable society….and hence towards major economic and social upheaval.

What do others think of Rudd’s nation building?

Ludwig I find your post a bit strange, yes I am aware you consider we have enough people now and do not need to grow.
But it is not just Rudd who puts these projects in place.
As I have told you in other posts I worked on road construction and maintaining for 22 years.
Some plans existed 20 years before they became new roads.
Unnecessary?
NSW Pacific highway upgrades, started even before John Howard won his first election are property of both sides of the house.
Here we once hit the headlines almost weekly with our name, The Highway of Death.
3 smashes 12 deaths in 2 weeks.
73, YES 73 dead motorists before we stopped counting in less than 100 klms.
We see far less death and trauma on our new roads.
We look in horror at what was once our national highway and wonder how we did not see much more.
Planning and such means todays construction was planned years ago.
So while Rudd is spending its on yesterdays planed work, not his.

Hi Ludwig.
Maybe some of the building has to do with Defence.
Defence dont say much about certain things, but they do work I believe towards something or other regarding an invader.

A few years back 'they' (the powers that be) upgraded the Mt. Lindsay Highway which goes from somewhere near Brisbane, then onto towards Woodenbong in northern NSW and ends up, or used to end up, at Tenterfield NSW.
I couldnt figure why they wanted to upgrade the road as it was a quiet road anyway, with few trucks or cars.

It seemed that the upgrade was around the time of a few years ago when certain regional airports were also getting upgrades...which I likewise put down to defence.
Maybe its been decided, like the new railway line from Adelaide to Darwin, that in time of invasion populations would benefit from faster and easier exits out of the north as would defence with the upgrading of other once secondary roads.

Hi Ludwig
I do think it is important to maintain and build on our infrastructure particularly given the great influxes of population to Australia.

I also think our rail services need upgrading and some regional services that were cancelled re-opened. If peak oil and environmental issues continue to impact the globe we will be looking at more local tourism and hopefully a return to locally grown produce - all needing infrastructure to support it.

Personally I would rather see some population controls and less adherence to the modern mantra of continuous and unfettered growth with negative consequences particularly in our largest cities where health services struggle to keep up.

If we can curb this population growth obsession then we can also save money on new highways or major upgrades.

Many of these projects are State managed too, they may not be part of the overall Rudd plan for infrastructure.

Certainly health and education need more attention with the emphasis being on health.

They can also open that New England railway line north of Armidale NSW.
Its a national defence tragedy that such a line should be closed for so long covered with weeds and full of rotten sleepers in a world of growing turmoil.
I dont know about you but a quick glance at the shifting military climate suggests trouble for the 'southern lands' at a later date.

Belly, the point is that these projects are directly in line with Rudd’s nation building and constant expansionist philosophy. He should have said when he first got into power; ‘hold on, these hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked for highway upgrades could be much better spent elsewhere.’

As far as improved road safety goes, I’ve had a great deal to say about it on OLO. In short, upgraded roads are NOT the answer. Better driver education and law enforcement are the answers. I recently travelled the most notorious piece of road in Queensland; a section of the Bruce Highway near Gympie. It was very clear to me that the problem there is driver behaviour, NOT the state of the road. The same applies just about everywhere.

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Gibo, I share your concerns about national defence. Maybe you’re right about this sort of infrastructure. I wonder.

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Pelican: “I do think it is important to maintain and build on our infrastructure particularly given the great influxes of population to Australia.”

YES! If we greatly reduced population growth…which could so easily be done in Australia…we’d have to spend FAR FAR less on infrastructure, health, education, etc in order to achieve real improvements. With the current absurdly high population growth rate, just about all of our national efforts in these areas are simply going towards providing the same level of services and quality of life for more and more people, without significantly improving the average person’s quality of life.