Quoting "Craig Sanders" <cas@taz.net.au>

profit is an inherent inefficiency, one that is acceptable for many things (especially where there is significant *real* competition to offset that ineffeciency or for luxuries and frivolous things), but is completely unacceptable for either natural monopolies (like water, gas, electricity, and wired telecommmunications supply) or essential services like public transport (also a natural monopoly) and hospitals.

Everybody who worked for a consultancy knows that you are having two masters to please, the customer and the employer. Similar things happen in every privatised business serving public interests. E.g. Metro: They get money if they are punctual. So they run late trains as express now - and I have to wait for another train that serves my station (so instead of late I'm later). That is not in the customer's, the public interest but in Metro's. There are many examples, e.g. toll ways that get tweaked during the planning process to increase profit (improving traffic flows comes second) and others. BTW: I lived in Hanover. They built innercity freeways in the 60/70ies - and knocked them down 30 years later. They realised that innercity freeways don't improve traffic. Berlin, after unification, did not build many free-ways - they renovated, expanded and unified the railways. As a result you do not hurry to a railway station fearing to miss a train - you know that the next train comes in three or four minutes. If I miss my train here, I have to wait 20 minutes. and the train from Macauley station to Southern Cross (two stops, less than 5 km) takes usually more than 10, most times up to 20 minutes, parking before reaching North Melbourne and then at Southern Cross again, giving me 5 or 10 minutes to marvel at the Etihad Stadium (Not that I would be faster by car, there are already two level-crossings in Kensington less than a km apart..) Nope, we do not need any better ways to get the trains from North and West into town. We don't need the railway tunnel. Just dig up the Royal Park instead, for another congested freeway to get stuck in. And the world is flat. So far my "lefties' bias". Wondering why it is actually anything is "left" about thinking about solving infrastructure problems. Or learning from other places. This ostrich-like head in the sand attitude of the Liberals cannot be in their genes. AFAIK Liberal governments were around before, and Australia is a well developed place. I think this "left" vs. "right" is just intellectual laziness. Regards Peter