"Making it Happen", Baird style

The Baird government’s newly released state plan, titled “Making It Happen”, is at least as significant for what’s missing from it as for what it contains.

The new plan replaces the state government’s former “NSW 2021:A Plan to Make NSW Number One”, released in September 2011, after Barry O’Farrell’s election as NSW Premier.

The original plan contained general goals and hundreds of specific targets, grouped under the key policy areas of Economy, Transport, Health, Family and Community Services, Education, Police and Justice, Infrastructure, Environment and Communities, and Accountability.

The new Baird plan significantly reduces the number of goals and targets and entirely scraps a number of these categories, and their associated goals and targets.

For Newcastle, one of the most significant changes is the scrapping of the “transport” category, and the previous plan’s specific target (under Goal 8) to “increase the share of commuter trips made by public transport to and from Newcastle CBD during peak hours to 20% by 2016.”

Before the Baird government cut the Newcastle rail line on Boxing Day last year, the evidence suggests that they were on track to achieve this relatively modest target, with official figures indicating that increased use of rail services were providing a steady increase in commuter trips to and from the Newcastle CBD.

Since the rail cut, the numbers are trending decisively the other way. 

It’s difficult to be exact about the specific extent of the decline, because the state government hasn’t yet provided data that would allow a direct comparison of what we now have with what we’ve lost. However, the downward trend is clear.

The NSW Minister for Transport, Andrew Constance, recently confirmed to a parliamentary estimates committee that the replacement bus service between Hamilton and Newcastle Stations is providing around 65,000 trips per month, which works out to an average of 2,167 per day on a 30 day month. 

Other official figures indicate that the rail services that these buses replaced were providing 4,668 trips per weekday, or around 140,000 on a 30 day month. 

That’s more than twice the figure given by the Minister for the replacement bus service.

Because the Minister’s daily rate figures include weekend days and the others don’t, they can’t be directly compared. But Newcastle and Civic rail stations were known to be strong weekend performers, so the difference that factor would make is likely to be negligible.

That means that it’s almost certain that public transport patronage to and from the Newcastle CBD has been more than halved since the government cut rail services to Wickham, Civic and Newcastle stations.

The figures for bus use offer no glimmer of light. 

Patronage and fare-box revenue figures for Newcastle Buses have been headed downwards for many years, and the current year figures show that they still are.

It’s hard not to conclude that the reason the Baird government’s new plan hasn’t retained the Newcastle transport target from the previous plan is that they’ve realised that their decision to cut the Newcastle rail line makes it unachievable.

Better to remove the target itself than face the embarrassment of inevitable failure.

It corresponds with the Baird government’s whole approach to the rail issue in Newcastle, including its recent steadfast refusal to include any discussion of re-establishing train services on the rail corridor land in their recent “Community Engagement” process on the city’s revitalisation. 

Refuse to provide information or evidence to support the policy, attempt to circumvent legal requirements, ignore their self-declared “referendum” on the issue, refuse to discuss it, and remove relevant targets to disguise policy failure.

That's “Making it happen”, Mike Baird style.