The PM AND Lappy, page-70

Hingdog, Melbourne's traffic flow problems are not limited to Punt Road and the Eastern Freeway; there are massive problems throughout the city.

But there's also more than one way to solve Melbourne's congestion woes and the projected cost of $1b per km is just obscene. Before just letting it all hang loose by adding bits here and there and slugging motorists our leaders need to take a deep breath and design the city for TEN millions by 2050. Then they need to work backwards to develop a strategic implementation plan that and stick to it.

If our pollies continue to treat such matters as a political football they'll grind Victoria's finances into the ground and cripple the state's economy. If the Chinese can do such things, surely we can too.

It stuns me that neither Labor nor Liberal have been able to make MYKI work. Other massively better systems already exist as models. HongKong's brilliant Octopus Card has been around since 1997 while London's Oyster Card is almost as good and has worked since 2003, I just don't get understand why MYKI has proven so difficult and to be so limited.

As for the desal plant, Labor certainly under-estimated its cost and people like me could only scratch our heads at the remuneration it commanded. But governments cannot allow huge cities like Melbourne to run dry. As its population grows and drought returns it will save our bacon and prove to be more than just an expensive insurance policy.