Torturing facts to toe the anti-rail line

Rumours of an imminent announcement from the NSW Coalition government about the future of the Newcastle rail line are rife around town - again.
Forgive my skepticism, but don't be surprised if it comes as a silly season curtain-raiser, unleashed for formal public comment in the January festive fog, when the media goes to sleep and attention is on the cricket and the beach, or when many are away or enjoying family time with the kids on holiday.
On cue for this scenario, the former NSW Premier and current head of Infrastructure NSW, Nick Greiner, made local news in a recent speech to the Hunter Business Chamber, saying that the Newcastle rail line should be cut.
But there was nothing new in anything that Mr Greiner had to say about the Newcastle rail line
In 1990, Mr Greiner's government was the first to announce an intention to cut the rail line, despite a comprehensive expert report it had jointly commissioned with Newcastle Council (the Travers-Morgan Newcastle CBD Transport and Development Study) comparing the various options for the future of the rail line that rated keeping it as superior to the other alternatives on four out of five criteria.
That wasn't what the government,or the vested interests lobbying to cut the line, wanted to hear, so the study's release was accompanied by a brief announcement from the government and council-appointed steering committee recommending that the rail line be cut.
Since then, deliberately or unwittingly, advocates for cutting the rail line have repeatedly misrepresented the steering committee recommendation as though it was from the study report itself.
Unfortunately, this established a disturbing pattern of misrepresentation in a range of influential government reports and studies into the rail line's future over the next two decades.
A series of reports prepared under the Iemma Labor government during 2003 and 2004 by the Lower Hunter Transport Working Group, initiated by the then Minister for the Hunter, Michael Costa, culminated in advising that the line should be cut at Broadmeadow.
However, when Professor Graham Currie, from the Institute of Transport Studies of the Department of Civil Engineering at Monash University, reviewed these reports in 2005 he was highly critical of their methodology, data and analysis, and concluded that they provided "biased, flawed and misrepresented advice".
The most recent example in this lamentable tradition is the Hunter Development Corporation's Newcastle City Centre Renewal Report, released in March 2009, which supported cutting the line west of Stewart Avenue.
This recommendation turned out to be based on the (incorrectly) assumed view of Newcastle University that a university CBD campus would not be viable with the rail line in place, resulting in a $640million anti-rail error in the cost-benefit calculations on which the study and its recommendation relied.
It's clear that the option of keeping the rail line would easily win a corrected cost-benefit analysis, but the report's discredited recommendation is still widely quoted by anti-rail advocates, including the recently elected Lord Mayor, Jeff McCloy, and the Hunter Business Chamber.  Neither the HDC nor the current Coalition government has moved to set the record straight.
The strategy of the anti-rail campaign over the past two decades seems to be that if the facts don't fit, just distort or ignore them, and keep repeating the mantra that the rail line must go until people are eventually bludgeoned into accepting it.