Call that pork-barrelling? Hold my beer, says Jess Wilson

On the morning that Premier Ben Carroll met with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese under grey Melbourne skies to bring forward plans to build a rail line to the airport, Opposition Leader Jess Wilson posted a video committing a future Coalition government to the same thing.

Beneath a sparkling blue sky, Wilson pledged, as part of the airport rail project, to deliver a shiny new train station in Keilor East by 2031 – a mirror promise to the one just made by the premier and PM. Deirdre Chambers, what a coincidence!

As best as we can piece together, it looks as though the Liberal Party caught wind of what Labor was up to and shot its video ahead of time to gazump the policy. The problem is, no one thought to tell the party’s public transport spokesman and resident trainspotter, Matthew Guy, before they posted it.

Had they done so, Guy would have probably been less scornful in his appraisal of the need for a new train station at Keilor East when he was questioned about it, by this reporter, shortly after Labor’s announcement.

Instead, Guy told me: “The whole concept of a Keilor East station was never factored in to the original airport rail line. This has only come in, in the last few years, because of his seat. There is no public-interest case for it.”

Guy’s comments are spot on but made things awkward for Wilson on Thursday morning. Did she agree there was no public-interest case for building a Keilor East station, the thing she had just promised to do?

Wilson downplayed Guy’s remarks as “historic comments from a time and place” – never mind that they were only 24 hours old – and recommitted the Coalition to delivering a new train station for the people of Keilor East, who also happen to live in Carroll’s marginal seat of Niddrie.

The context of Guy’s comments was a broader discussion about using major projects as a form of electoral pork barrelling. Guy’s view – one shared by some people in the Labor Party — is that manipulating the design of something as important and costly as the long-promised Melbourne Airport Rail Link to buy votes in the premier’s seat is a particularly malodorous example.

If that is the case, Wilson and her opposition are every bit as whiffy as the Carroll government. They just aren’t as good at masking the stench.

The only reason that Wilson and her campaign advisers were so keen to me-too a new train station in Niddrie is because their polling shows that, for the first time since the electorate was created half a century ago, the Liberal Party is a genuine chance to win the seat.

To improve their electoral prospects, they committed to the current design and time frame for a $12 billion-and-counting, long-term, major project – including fast-tracking construction of the next stage – without considering alternatives, debating the matter within shadow cabinet or seeking the views of the person in the Liberal Party room who knows more about the project than anyone else.

When it comes to airport rail links, there is a fundamental, philosophical divide between experts who think they should be integrated into a metropolitan network and others who argue that arriving and departing airline passengers are better served by a fast, standalone train line and purpose-designed carriages with room for large suitcases.

Guy is well versed on both these arguments. He should also think about following his party leader on Instagram.

When Guy took my call he was in Sydney, riding on a train (of course), making mental notes about some of the things that NSW governments have done over the past two decades to make their metropolitan train system more efficient than ours.

Sydney began construction on a train line to the airport in 1995 and finished it in time for the 2000 Olympics.

When it comes to pork-barrelling major projects in Victoria, the gold medal still goes to Labor, silver to the Coalition, and we are all losers for it.

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