Doubt cast over $700m Toowoomba crossing pledge - ABC Online

By Fidelis Rego

Posted April 26, 2013 09:00:20

An infrastructure specialist at Queensland's Bond University says federal governments should not be put off from building roads, despite the nature of the economy.

Economists are expecting the Federal Government to post a multi-billion dollar deficit this financial year.

The Coalition has promised $700 million to begin the second Toowoomba range crossing on the state's Darling Downs if it wins the September election.

Bond University professor Michael Regan says going into debt to fund infrastructure projects is an acceptable risk.

"If we look at infrastructure from the returns we get from it in economic and social terms, we have to weight that up against the cost and debt of funding it, so there are some short-term implications for probably feasibility studies," he said.

"I think long-term the impacts will probably be not quite so great."

Professor Regan says the Coalition's promise may have to be reconsidered in the short-term because of the nature of the economy.

"All of the changes on the revenue side, that's the problems, the decline in revenue and many would have heard of the mining tax and so forth, they're unsustainable which means we're going to have a problem in the next three four five years maybe," he said.

"In that case I think you'll find governments will be constrained."

Meanwhile, the LNP Member for Groom, Ian Macfarlane, says the second range crossing will be included in the Coalition's first budget.

"Building the Toowoomba range crossing is not something that will cause us to be in deficit longer than we expect because it's already been factored into our figures," he said.

"What will cause us to be in deficit longer than we expect if [Wayne] Swan, the [federal] Treasurer, has not been telling the truth about the true state of the books."

Mr Macfarlane says the crossing work will be funded by savings in the budget.

"While we understand there will be a lot of pressure on the budget, the biggest issue in terms of returning to surplus will be to stop the wasteful [spending], so the extraordinary waste we're seeing on a gold-plated NBN [National Broadband Network] when we can have an NBN at a quarter of the price," he said.

Topics: community-development, federal---state-issues, activism-and-lobbying, federal-elections, regional, regional-development, road-transport, toowoomba-4350