20 tested tips on taking credit, passing the buck or making nothing happen in transport

Project running over time and over budget? Treasury says no but you want to be seen to do stuff? Or at least not get embarrassed if you don't? 

Because heaps of political hopefuls, hacks and hangers-on read this, here's some tips to spin your way home until safely after your next election victory.  

1. Cool a hot issue by releasing an unfunded plan. Post tiktoks with trains, blogs with bikes or even Facebook with ferries. Whatever you do just get it in the media to shift the conversation. Getting the general sentiment from the government doesn't care to I think they're trying is a huge win. Leave the specifics to a later implementation plan if you're scared about being held accountable. Oh, in unrelated news, Victoria's Bus Plan came out three years ago last month.   

2. Fold a failed smaller plan into an even bigger plan. Doing a bold reset is a great trick if your smaller plan is getting stale with few runs on the board. That bigger plan can be sold as being more comprehensive or holistic as you background media on the smaller plan's limitations. In transport use words like integrated and multimodal and say the new plan is a product of a more sophisticated understanding. Don't worry about its cost; I'll deal with that later. 

3. Open the process for public consultation. A great way to buy time while be seen to be listening.  Transport Planning 2.0 is all about replacing old-style top-down with bottom-up imagineering that meets people where they are at and addresses the zeitgeist's suspicion of unresponsive 'we know best' bureaucracy. The full process requires at least two rounds of workshopping, collating sticky notes and reporting back, adding a handy 18 months to your charade. You might even be able to just drop it if enough people forget. Suddenly the 4 years between state elections doesn't seem so long. 

4. Shove an expensive project off to an expensive public-private partnership. All you need to know is that PPP means AAA. They are great instruments if you really must be seen to be building something while keeping the state's credit rating. PPPs are financing tricks that keep big borrowings off your books yet you still get the credit for what gets built or operated. Plus it provides another unaccountable outfit to blame. If you think that smells fishy you're wrong; it's more like diesel fumes as any Southern Cross Station user knows. 

5. Establish a task force or call an inquiry. Doing this indicates humbleness, not the first trait that necessarily comes to mind with politicians and staffers, especially someone ambitious and talent-exuding like yourself. Spending taxpayers' money on something like high speed rail is a serious affair that requires proper deliberation and the best possible advice from experts in the field. After all Rome wasn't built in a day. Questions can then be deflected to the inquiry. 

Getting someone known to be lukewarm to the idea to head the inquiry is a great money-saving tip  as it could save you from having to build it at all. One of those 'pricing makes all problems go away' economist wonks from Infrastructure Wherever or the Grattan Institute would have been perfect. Sadly Grattan closed its transport unit but its alumni still lurk.

The other trick is to recruit the highest-profile outside advocate. By making them a house-trained enthusiast for 'change from within', you are mending bridges, winning hearts and blunting opposition. A master stroke all round, whether anything gets built or not! 

Just don't play this card too often, as the one-term 2010-2014 Coalition government found to its cost through its ultimately inconsequential reports on Rowville, Doncaster and Avalon rail. 

6. Offer to fund only 50%, with the other half dependent on federal government funding. You cannot lose from this. If the feds cough up you can still take the credit. If they don't then you've kept your money and can blame Canberra for ignoring your state. This works especially well if the federal government is the opposite party to you or is otherwise on the nose. You can play the same trick with local governments for smaller scale projects. With the added benefit that if things get acrimonious the state government can just sack the council (or arrange party stooge candidates for October's elections). 

Involving a major private sector stakeholder can add even more fun. Especially if said stakeholder (a) wants the project to be gold-plated, while simultaneously (b) having a vested interest in the project not proceeding (they might be the state's biggest, most profitable and monopolistic car park operator for example). The result is a stalemate that suits everyone important as you, the state government, can use the money otherwise while blaming others.  

7. Invent fairy godmothers with names like 'private sector investment', 'venture capital' or 'value capture'. That can make up funding shortfalls for mega projects. Or at least raise enough confidence to get government funding past the point of no return (even if the private deal falls through). This is the 'sunk cost theory', an apt term given the especially high costs of tunnelled transport projects. See also TBTF. 

8. Use organisational restructuring as a shield or excuse for delaying projects. Any seasoned bureaucrat will tell you that you must get the structure right before you can deliver anything. And have the right people. Because directly sacking people is difficult (and opens agencies up to challenge), restructures that achieve much the same effect by spilling positions are arguably better. 

This works best if you provide an assurance that the project is still alive by setting up a dedicated agency named after it to convey  hope, urgency, focus and, most of all, an impression of progress. Second best is to shuffle some of your people into a departmental project team that matches key words from your unfunded plan.      

9. Co-opt community groups' language to show you're listening. If a vocal community group calls themselves 'Rail Revival' then, as a canny operator you could do worse than rebrand your program  as 'Reviving Rail'. Don't have new money? Just reallocate existing staff and funding for now. Then you can leverage off the political pressure from the community group to justify your budget case for genuine new funding next year ($500k can buy a scoping study, some long lunches and even a study trip). 

 

10. The ferry good solution. If your big problem is road or rail congestion that involves billions you don't have to fix, brief journalists that you're planning modes like ferries, hot air balloons or electric helicopter taxis to relieve transport pressures. These are guaranteed for a bold front page to make you look forward thinking. And because hardly anyone understands their capabilities, it matters not that they are slower, lower capacity or less reliable than conventional bus or rail options.

As for winning friends and influencing people, no journo would turn down an afternoon on the Yarra riding a test ferry borrowed from a political donor. Especially if it's a sunny spring Thursday before Grand Final Friday and Parliament is disgorging the season's dismal annual and auditor-general reports which they'd otherwise be stuck poring over.    

11. Make it cheap, not good. Australians are cheap dates. Or at least that's what the politicians think. And cheap (or better still FREE!) is what gets the tongues twitching and the headlines happening. Even though in transport the evidence from revealed preference (as opposed to stated preference) is that better service gets higher patronage per dollar spent than cutting fares. 

Without the lead times for building infrastructure or even boosting timetables, cutting fares is a 'quick fix' power move the political class loves. Even if it doesn't necessarily politically work. For example two dollar fares didn't much help the Victorian Liberals in 2022. And Queensland Labor doesn't seem to be benefiting from this year's 50 cent pre-election fare bribe. Victorian Labor's 2022 regional fare cap promise might have won them some votes. But if you're a tired government or inept opposition then fare gimmicks won't save you. 

12. Call for private sector expressions of interest. Good for a quick headline and some amazing AI-inspired animations. Even better if you can persuade a respected former premier or party elder to 'take one for the party' by being a credibility-enhancing special adviser to a hastily-assembled private consortium. Artful dealing involves playing the 'commercial confidentiality' card to limit public scrutiny and thus embarrassment. Some might be tempted to pull this trick if there is a critical by-election but public faith in anything coming from such schemes is now rightfully low, as various bygone fast rail and airport transport schemes attest. 

13. Promise something and then overshadow it with a bigger promise. On 9 August 2018 then premier Daniel Andrews promised a tram to Rowville.  On August 28 he promised the much larger Suburban Rail Loop. The SRL got people talking. The government has started SRL work with gusto. However it ignored the Rowville tram, with this being just the latest in a long list of previous broken promises regarding public transport in Knox. Masterfully this has had no electoral impact, with 2022 being even better than 2018 in terms of eastern suburbs seats won.  

14. Use kids to inspire their parent voters. Examples include family fun days, colouring-in books, model trains and competitions. These add to the goodwill and excitement around a project. The memories this generates when some of those kids become politicians 30 years later is priceless. 

15. Release another plan to shift priorities. Melbourne was going to get 4 orbital SmartBus routes according to its 2006 'Meeting Our Transport Challenges' plan (MOTC). Then the trains started failing and political urgency shifted to rail with population growth and patronage pressures. Eddington reported. Shortly after the Victorian Transport Plan came out. This was generally much bigger than MOTC but it cut the 4 orbital bus routes to 2.7, with these all being operational by the end of 2010 along with major Doncaster area bus upgrades. These have proved successful and probably weakened community calls for rail. This didn't save the Brumby government but they lost by only a small margin and were back in 4 years.     

17. Scale things down or spin them out. First cut a big project into smaller chunks (geographic naming like north, south, west and especially east can work well). Only intend to fund one segment. Then make it a demonstration or pilot project, with no commitment to fund others. Or, if you are really hard-up just budget funds for a feasibility study (year 1), planning work (year 2) and initial preparatory works (year 3). That buys the better part of four years before you need to find substantive funding for construction. But you can still share Instagram animations unabated from the start so you get two elections' value from the one project. Any longer though is counterproductive, as anyone from Melton will say about their promised hospital. 

18. Go gold plated. That's good to make a big media splash and shift the narrative, especially if that dinky distributor you took to the election hardy made a splash. Spend big on promotion and say we only deserve the best. That may just happen to be a 'shovel-ready' unsolicited tunnel bid from a consortium (preferably 'known' and 'sound' by virtue of it engaging, say, a former ministerial adviser) with cool animations just one Facebook share away.

Pull this trick early to assure industry that it's 'business as usual' if you're a new government. Or consider it late if your tired administration is polling unsalvageably bad three months before an election. Since you'll lose you won't need to deliver. But showing vision might moderate your loss. It's like 'pump and dump' for shonky stockbrokers but for policies.

19. Do the rebundle trick. You have a plan for B that's struggling, since it was a 'plan for a plan' that was released without funding. But you were always going to do A as business as usual stuff that was anticipated even before the B plan came out. Provided that A is at least tenuously related to B you can rebundle what you always intended for A as being pursuant to implementing B. And thus the plan for B lives (albeit in name only).  

Another ploy is to spread the name of one of your popular marginal seat projects to an area that's getting indignant. For example, who thinks that there's no better name than 'SRL West' for a Werribee line electrification extension to Wyndham Vale?   

20. Use the right numbers to tell your best story. Project running over time or, like the >$100m spent on Hoddle St, doesn't look like achieving its aims? Maybe it's blown its budget? Don't worry. Wear its inflated cost with pride, saying it's an investment. Or point to the number of jobs it's 'created' (even if  temporary, casual or part-time labour hire stuff).

A rail infrastructure upgrade might have led to just 8 trips per weekday being added to the timetable. That can look pretty small. Fear not. Multiply it by 5 for a weekly total, 21 for a monthly figure or 250 for an annual number. All of a sudden you are into the thousands, without having to do any more work! 

No one with power seriously cares about benefit cost ratios, but low figures do cause commentariat chatter and help those out to smear you. If your $10 billion project's benefits looks low add some 'wider economic benefits' to jack up the numbers.  Adjust discount rates or use a different baseline. 

Downplay alternatives, or dismiss them as pointless if the project is settled government policy. Throw in $100m of walking and cycling measures to give it greenwash cred, lift the BCR and blunt opposition. Never recalculate if the project cost blows out and avoid benefit realisation audits on completed projects. That's about all that's needed as most journalists (and opposition political staffers) are arts graduates who failed maths at school.  
 

Conclusion

These 20 tested tips to do nothing for less will not only help you spin to survive but impress your colleagues and keep you on top. This is highly virtuous because nature abhors a vacuum. Every moment that you are not in power is a moment that the wrong people are. 

By being around to read this you've already shown what you're made of, valiantly working through Melbourne's bleak midwinter, keeping tabs on who's in with whom, and making every day a career climb. Not like some of your shirking colleagues wasting state parliament's month off for, at best, overseas 'study trips', meeting people in positions irrelevant to their future while the real pros stay home scheming.   

Just keep this a secret and you will go far. After all, you don't need to be particularly good, just better than your rival at the time, OK?  

More power tips are welcome and can be added in the comments below.