Jan. 22, 2013, 11 p.m.
IN trying to defend the way the O'Farrell government has used its much-vaunted Hunter Infrastructure and Investment Fund, that fund's chairman, Liberal Peter Blackmore, has raised as many concerns as he has answered.
Hunter people will recall how, before the most recent state election, Mr O'Farrell came to Newcastle on a campaign visit.
Mr O'Farrell promised to can Tillegra Dam, recognising that many Hunter people didn't understand why they should pay higher water rates to drought-proof the Central Coast.
He promised to spend the money that the state was to have paid for Tillegra on a variety of other goodies for the Hunter.
Thus demonstrating an apparent ignorance of current events in the Hunter, because the state - in its traditional manner - was never going to pay a brass razoo for the controversial dam.
Originally it was going to be paid for by higher water rates for Hunter people, by water sales to the Central Coast, and by a levy on property developers.
But the Coasties got $80 million, no strings attached, as an election bribe to build their own water pipeline from the Wyong River. Goodbye water sales income.
Then the developers gave the government a report saying the Hunter didn't need the dam and wouldn't need a new water source for ages. Goodbye developer levy.
In the end the only mugs left standing were Hunter Water customers.
But Mr O'Farrell didn't seem to know that.
He seemed to think the state had been planning to pay and he promised to divert the $350 million in what would have been - if he was right - a budget-neutral switch.
But he was wrong. When he found out there was no state budget allocation for Tillegra, he was stuck. He'd have to discard the promise or stand up like a man and say he'd find the cash anyway. He chose the second path.
And ever since, the public service mandarins in Sydney seem to have been trying to find ways of clawing back that $350 million.
The easiest way to do that is to use the money to pay for things they would have, or should have, been paying for anyway from their regular annual budget.
Of course, this gets contentious in the Hunter, where we should, if life was fair, get about a 10 per cent share of every state budget, both capital and recurrent. History shows that hardly ever happens, simply because the overwhelming majority of politicians, votes and bureaucrats are in Sydney.
So when Mr Blackmore wrote in yesterday's Herald that "the Hunter Infrastructure and Investment Fund . . . has delivered funding for many projects that have long been identified by the community as sorely needed, but not funded, through agencies' normal budget cycles", he was more or less rubbing salt into the wound.
Then he talked about where the money is being allocated.
For example, $15 million for the Glendale interchange project, and $25 million to the University of Newcastle city campus.
That's beaut, but clearly neither allocation is enough to actually finish either job.
So, will the money even get spent? And if it does, will we see a result of any sort?
The Wine Country roads upgrade is a good $20 million project, but am I being too cynical when I ask whether it's just in time to assist the gas extraction bandwagon that some fear may knock-out the Hunter wine industry?
And anyway, why wasn't that roadwork done years ago as part of normal state roads funding? Same with the $500,000 for new beds at Cessnock and Kurri Kurri hospitals.
Maybe Mr Blackmore is right. Maybe we reptiles of the press are ungrateful animals.
"This model is unique to the Hunter and is the envy of many other regions," he concluded.
So, we got an unexpected crumb that fell off Sydney's feasting table because of a silly mistake by a wannabe premier.
Shut up and be grateful, even if the crumb keeps shrinking. I doubt it will happen again.
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