Gladys Berejiklian

[Black Orchid]

The company building the troubled Sydney light rail project has accused the New South Wales Government of misleading it before it signed up for the project, court documents have revealed.

Key points:
The Spanish company building Sydney's light rail is locked in a legal battle with the NSW Government
The $1.1 billion lawsuit relates to power and water infrastructure which was affected by the project
The project is overbudget and behind schedule
Spanish sub-contractor Acciona Infrastructure Australia has filed proceedings in the Supreme Court against Transport for NSW (TfNSW) for "misleading and deceptive" conduct.

The $1.1 billion lawsuit relates to power infrastructure supplied by Ausgrid.

Acciona wants financial compensation from the State Government and claims it was "induced" by TfNSW to enter a contract to build the CBD light rail on a "false premise".

In documents tendered to the court, the contractor claimed a "critical part and key delivery risk" of the project was how they would deal with underground electricity infrastructure, including those owned by Ausgrid and other water and gas companies.

The company has alleged it was made to believe electricity provider Ausgrid had reviewed and accepted the treatments of its utilities, but it had not.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-13/s ... nt/9652652

Meanwhile we have massive road closures and work sites dotted all over the place that are all but empty of workers.

[Black Orchid]

And from this ...



To this ...

[LEFTWINGER supreme]

Another Libtard government about to get whacked

[Black Orchid]

Move over Gladys I think your days are numbered.

NSW Opposition Leader Luke Foley has backed Tony Abbott’s call for a closer look at immigration, including a cut to total numbers, saying that if elected he would push for the yearly intake to be decided by the state and federal governments in a proper “national population policy”.

Mr Foley’s call for a more sensible immigration policy has echoes of former Labor premier Bob Carr’s “Sydney is full” pronouncement. Mr Foley argues the federal government “reaps the benefits” of higher immigration, through increased tax revenue, but that state governments “wear the cost” in having to meet infrastructure needs.

The comments by the Labor leader, whose opposition is deadlocked 50-50 with Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s Coalition in the latest Newspoll, come amid great concern in Sydney about the speed of development.

“From 2004 to 2008, the net migrant intake went from about 110,000 to about 300,000 and the capacity of our large cities in this country to cope is being severely tested and the test is greatest in Sydney,” Mr Foley tells The Weekend Australian.

“The migration intake has to be set, not simply by the commonwealth government alone any more, but by all Australian governments working jointly, given the burden the states bear in having to pay for the infrastructure.

“And I think we need to set the migrant intake numbers on a five-yearly basis going forward … and the discussion occurs every year between the commonwealth and the states.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation ... ba653b6fcc

I could never stand a bar of Bob Carr but on this I am in full agreement.

[Black Orchid]

It looks like Gladys is worrying about the March election and is suddenly backtracking on some of her abominable decisions. With over 300,000 people signing the petition about advertising on the Opera House in the space of a couple of days maybe she is finally realising how precarious her job really is.

She has been busy knocking down houses and cramming as many units into her own electorate that she can so she can fill them up with Chinese etc and now all of a sudden she does an about turn and decides that she suddenly wants NSW to dramatically slash its overseas migrant intake by up to 50 per cent.

Too little too late.

[cods]

it appears to be the same in Melb black orchid.... same here in ACT where no tree is safe from this greedy govt...

we also are getting a light rail... already the course has been changed... I dont keep up with it because its too depressing...but last I heard thet want the rail to cross a bridge that is in the Fed govts triangle...and the cost will blow out by $3bn...I stopped asking after that....

parking is basically a nightmare now huge developments one has more than 300 units yet parking is at a minimum...the light rail btw goes nowhere near this particular eyesore...

[Black Orchid]

In 2 of the areas where the units are multiplying on a weekly basis there are no trains and there is no light rail. Just unreliable buses and one of the main thoroughfares is only 2 lanes wide so when the buses stop ALL the traffic behind them has to stop as well. It's ridiculous.

New shopping centres and a dozen new unit blocks per month and no trains?

So a similar deal to the ACT it seems. Very bad planning.

[Rorschach]

light rail in Sydney was a dumb idea the roads unlike melbourne's are not wide enough.
Why did they think we did away with TRAMS all those years ago?

[Black Orchid]

“It will require a politician the likes of a Keating or a Kennett, somebody with the will to bulldoze vested interests, to override the power of Transurban now that Transurban is entrenched.” Ian Bell.

Transurban has won the bid for Australia’s biggest privatisation and infrastructure project, WestConnex (WcX). The toll-road leviathan is already entrenched in Sydney as the dominant operator, in Brisbane and Melbourne too. Who are the winners and losers from this deal? NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is one clear winner.

Actuary and transport expert Ian Bell, who has exposed on this website the financial engineering behind WestConnex, echoes the sentiment of many WcX observers in saying the government of Gladys Berejiklian has surpassed expectations by jagging a $9.3 billion cheque from Transurban. That $9.3 billion buys 51 per cent of Sydney Motorway Corporation (SMC), the secretive state-controlled company which houses the road project.

The price is higher than expected, although, as mathematician and WcX activist Ben Aveling says, the headline figure of $9.3 billion is tarted up. It is not really $9.3 billion, but really $8.3 billion as $1.1 billion is coming out of WcX itself.

“The government doesn’t really get $9.3 billion, and the consortium doesn’t really pay $9.3 billion,” says Aveling. $5.3 billion of the money that goes to the government has to be used to pay to finish the project.” That cost, delivering the final third stage of WestConnex, a tunnel under Sydney’s inner west linking the M4 and M5 motorways, remains unknown.

Whether the deal fails or not in the longer term, whether Sydney motorists are skewered by its slew of new tolls, matters little in the short-term.

“The NSW Government has committed to spending $16.8 billion, in order to sell roads that we already owned, for perhaps $3.0 billion,” says mathematician and WcX activist Ben Aveling.”

“According to Credit Suisse, if we had just privatised the M4 and the M5 the value would have been about $9 billion.”

However, the fundamental problem for any analyst is that nobody has the foggiest about value of WcX as traffic forecasts and financial models are secret. We don’t know that is, what the Berejiklian government has sold. What are the indemnities?

“What “material adverse effect” clauses are in the contract which allow Transurban to sue the state should the likes of a future rail project affect WestConnex revenues,” asks Ian Bell.

“It was a bigger number than we thought they would come up with,” says Bell of the offer, an offer which beat off the rival pitch from the industry funds consortium. “They have paid a large control premium (buying 51 per cent of SMC) in light of the capital cost (of this project)”.

“The last figure on cost was a Macquarie Bank estimate of $18 billion and Transurban’s estimate of $25 billion enterprise value gives us some idea of what they are thinking”.

Another major uncertainty is the level of subsidy for future projects: “The tolls don’t cover the cost of these”.

“They are paying a control premium to put their foot on the Western Harbour Tunnel, Stage One of F6 and the Northern Beaches link … and the concession agreement for the M4, M5 link is hidden”.

As the government had, years ago, the option of building a mass transit rail system instead of toll-roads, Western Sydney motorists can be considered losers in the deal. As Tony Boyd put it in the Financial Review: “If you own a car and live in Sydney Melbourne or Brisbane, you will not be able to avoid Transurban – owning the shares is the only way to get your money back”.

https://www.michaelwest.com.au/transurb ... nd-losers/

[Black Orchid]

Another 7500 apartments would be built in St Leonards and Crows Nest on Sydney's lower north shore over the next 20 years, under long-delayed redevelopment plans being released by the Berejiklian government.

The volume of new housing to be created in the area, which intersects with NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian's seat of Willoughby, is understood to be less than had been included in earlier drafts of the so-called Planned Precinct, which has been under development for more than two years.

The Crows Nest and St Leonards scheme intends to concentrate development along the Pacific Highway and around the commercial core at St Leonards.

It also intends to retain the village atmosphere around Crows Nest, and prevent further overshadowing of Willoughby Road. (Absolutely impossible!)

>snip<

But independent councillor Zoe Baker criticised both the implied level of development and the process under which the scheme was being released in that councils were meant to be able to provide comment on plans before exhibition.

"It’s just too much," Cr Baker said of the 7500 extra dwellings potentially created by 2038. "It’s going to turn it into a soulless canyon of residential flat buildings."

The main new "green space" to be provided under the plans is an expansion of the existing Hume Street Park. This park is already being expanded under a six-year-old North Sydney council policy.

"They’re relying on what we’re already doing to try and ameliorate some of the existing densification, let alone the additional," Cr Baker said.

The St Leonards and Crows Nest plan was to have been released early this year. The plan comes on top of a separate project of building two new 27-storey residential towers on top of a Metro station, to be delivered by 2024.

The government’s draft plan says a "height expectation" of towers up to 50 storeys along the Pacific Highway had already been created. The plan proposes that areas around St Leonards station and the new Crows Nest metro station form "height peaks" with a dip in between.

Of the suggestion that the housing figures in the St Leonards and Crows Nest area have been pared back, Labor’s planning spokesman, Michael Daley, said planning under Ms Berejiklian had become "out of control and unfair".

"There seems to be one rule for the Premier and her Liberal friends and another rule for ordinary people all over Sydney," Mr Daley said.

The St Leonards and Crows Nest precinct touches the North Sydney, Lane Cove and Willoughby Council areas.

The plans come as the Premier attempts to dissociate her government from perceptions of over-development.

The Herald requested comment from Ms Berejiklian and Planning Minister Anthony Roberts. Mr Roberts said the plan had been informed by local character statements that had been developed with the Government Architect and councils.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sou ... 509kf.html

Anthony Roberts is even worse than Gladys. A huge disappointment. Most of these suburbs that they are over-developing on the North Shore are sold to the Chinese and then left empty. Beautiful heritage houses are being demolished to make way for ugly ugly colourful cheap looking cookie cutter blocks of units that will turn the North Shore into a slum in the future.