THE PSYCHOLOGIST : 'Father' of Inland Rail calls for project to end in Toowoomba amid cost blowouts

'Father' of Inland Rail calls for project to end in Toowoomba amid cost blowouts

The whole thing is a vast boondoggle. There appears to have been no comprehensive cost-benefit study of the idea. Judging by the similar Adelaide to Darwin link, it will remain largely unused and will not even cover the cost of its maintenance.

Rail is yesterday's idea. Only the huge output of mines needs it. Road transport is usually so much more convenient that rail will very rarely supplant it. Better roads are what is really needed

As the federal government seeks to rein in the multi-billion-dollar cost blowouts from the Melbourne to Brisbane Inland Rail project, some are asking: Will it ever be completed?

The man who is sometimes described as the "father" of the Inland Rail, Everald Compton, believes the government should cut its losses and finish the line at Toowoomba, 100km short of its original destination.

"It will never get to Brisbane — I reckon hell will freeze over quicker than this railway gets to Brisbane," the retired corporate fundraiser told ABC's 7.30. "The cost of getting down the Toowoomba range is extortionate."

An independent review of the Inland Rail has already recommended the line finish earlier in Queensland than originally planned.

Review author Kerry Schott said the double-stacked freight line should finish at a locality called Ebenezer, about 50 kilometres west of Brisbane, with connections to the Brisbane port through road and single-stack freight networks.

The freight and logistics industry has accepted this.

"It's understandable, because of urban encroachment, because of the cost of building new rail through existing urban areas," says Hermione Parsons from the Australian Logistics Council.

But the council warns against cutting out any more sections, saying it is important to get rail freight as close to the port as possible.

"The Port of Brisbane serves a very large hinterland – Queensland, parts of the Northern Territory, parts of northern New South Wales," Dr Parsons said.

"And that port is an important part of Queensland's resilience."

The proposed Ebenezer terminal was not part of the original plan for the Inland Rail, and it's still in the very early stage of planning.

"A preliminary evaluation for an intermodal terminal has been completed," a spokesman for the Queensland Transport Department told 7.30.

"We are working across government and with our federal colleagues towards the completion of the business case."

Liberal Party MP Garth Hamilton says this will inevitably mean further delays for a project already years behind schedule.

"Every day that we're delaying, if we go through more reviews, we're going to see more cost blowouts," the member for the federal seat of Groom said. "There is no way that Ebenezer stands up.

"I'm calling for a pause here – I'm calling for a pause at Toowoomba while this is worked out."

Progress in Queensland 'behind the eight ball'

The Australian Logistics Council says the Queensland government should become more actively involved in the debate.

"I'd be worried if I was the Queensland government about the staging of the Inland Rail project from Melbourne all the way up to Brisbane as the last leg, because that means the freight only has one way to go, which is south," Dr Parsons said.

"The Queensland government needs to be working on this and it's a bit behind the eight ball."

ABC's 7.30 sought comment from Queensland Transport Minister Mark Bailey. His department provided a written statement saying: "The state government is reviewing the Inland Rail's recommendations."

The project proponent, the Australian Rail Track Corporation (ARTC), originally proposed to finish construction of all four Queensland sections of the Inland Rail by 2025. However, it has yet to complete any of its Queensland environmental assessments. "There has been lengthy delays in his process, particularly in Queensland," the independent review found.

"[This was] caused in part by immature design and poor environmental impact statements that need numerous changes and resubmissions."

The Australian Logistics Council says the fundamental problem was that construction started on the whole project before the endpoint was decided, but it is pleased the Albanese government remains committed to finishing the project.

"This project potentially takes 200,000 trucks a year out of the equation of freight transport — that's important — [and] 750,000 tonnes of carbon reduction," Dr Parsons said.

"We need rail; our country lags behind terribly in terms of rail investment, yet it is an incredibly important mode and we don't have enough of it."

Everald Compton's original vision back in the 1990s was for the line to continue north to the central Queensland Port of Gladstone — and he's still a keen advocate for this future extension.

"We've simply got to say let's get rid of the nonsense, let's do some nation-building," he said.

But Dr Parsons is more cautious. "That's an extra. We need to get back to the fundamentals of the intercity rail link between Melbourne and Brisbane."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-03/father-inland-rail-everald-compton-delays-blowouts-730/102294532

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

'Father' of Inland Rail calls for project to end in Toowoomba amid cost blowouts

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