“Two-thirds of the $9 billion, 23-kilometre line will be built underground between Bella Vista and Epping.” Photo: Kate Geraghty

MORE than 90 properties on the north west rail link route will be bought and demolished as the state government forges ahead with the city’s biggest transport project since the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Business will be disrupted and residents will be subjected to noise, vibration and traffic during the five-year works, the scale of which was revealed yesterday when the first environmental impact statement was released.

Two-thirds of the $9 billion, 23-kilometre line will be built underground between Bella Vista and Epping.

The tunnels will be the deepest in Australia, dipping to 70 metres below the surface.

Most of the remainder of the line will be ground level with a four-kilometre elevated ”skytrain” between Bella Vista and Rouse Hill.

About 60 homes, 30 businesses and two other properties will be compulsorily acquired to allow for construction.

At Cherrybrook, 28 homes will be demolished to make way for a new station. The Hills Centre station at Castle Hill will require 11 businesses to go, and another seven properties will be resumed on Windsor Road near Kellyville Ridge.

A spokesman for the north west rail link said the government understood compulsory property acquisition ”can be a difficult time for many people”.

”At all times, [we have] been in close communication with people affected by the project and offered assistance to make the process as straightforward as possible,” the spokesman said.

The Hornsby Shire mayor, Nick Berman, said some homeowners were concerned at moves to buy them out, but most people understood the ”big picture” benefits.

”There is always going to be some people who wouldn’t have planned to move out, and no amount of money will totally satisfy them, but I think it will be the minority,” he said.

Tunnelling will take place 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Above-ground construction work, including eight new stations, will mostly be during daylight hours, Monday to mid-Saturday. Residents and institutions along the line from Epping to Rouse Hill will be affected by construction, including the Hillsong Church at Baulkham Hills, Beecroft Primary School and the Koala Park Sanctuary at West Pennant Hills.

Measures such as noise barriers and acoustic sheds will be used to minimise noise.

About 2.4 million cubic metres of earth will be excavated during the project, creating truck movements and additional noise.

The project will require small areas of endangered ecological communities to be removed, including Cumberland Plain Woodland and potential habitat for six listed species of flora and nine listed fauna species.

Businesses in the Hornsby Shire, Hills Shire and Blacktown City will be affected by reduced access and visibility, noise and vibration, but will benefit from increased trade and other income flowing from construction.

The project is expected to support more than 16,200 construction jobs and inject $25 billion into the NSW economy.

The link will provide 300,000 residents in north-western Sydney with rail access to destinations such as Epping, North Sydney and the Sydney central business district.

The environmental impact statement will be on display until May 21.

A second statement including the design of stations, other rail infrastructure and signalling systems will be released later this year.

Tunnelling is expected to start in 2014, and trains are due to run by 2019.

“Kevin’s style was to lock himself in a cave … then emerge as Moses from the mountain” … president of the Australian Institute of Public Administration Percy Allan. Photo: AP

IT MAY be popular now, but Labor’s $36 billion national broadband network is shaping up to be a financial disaster that will set Labor’s image back decades, rebranding it the party of waste and extravagance.

That’s the view of Percy Allan, president of the Australian Institute of Public Administration and a former head of the NSW Treasury under premiers Wran, Greiner and Fahey.

Releasing a report card on “public policy drift”, he told the Herald that Kevin Rudd came to office in 2007 promising “evidence-based” decision-making, but never spelled out what the term meant.

“True evidence-based decision making requires consultation. Kevin’s style was to lock himself in a cave and put in all the evidence and then emerge as Moses from the mountain with the tablets to tell the people what they would get.”

The broadband network is a case in point.

“It would have been quite possible to say ahead of the election ‘we are going to ensure everybody can have an opportunity to be hooked up to the internet at good speeds, and when we get into power we are going to put out a green paper on the options for doing that and we are going to get feedback and make a choice,’ ” Mr Allan said.

“That choice might be to spend $36 billion ripping out copper wire and disconnecting Foxtel cables and starting afresh, which is the proposition we are facing. But had they examined the need, examined options and consulted they might have discovered cheaper ways to fill the need.

“If a lower than expected proportion of people end up subscribing to it because they don’t want to pay Rolls-Royce prices for a Rolls-Royce service, this thing is going to be a financial disaster – watch public opinion then.”

From the Opposition, Labor would be tarred as a party of waste.

“It already has an image problem from the Whitlam years. If this thing goes under, the Liberal National Party will be able to say here’s just another example of waste and extravagance by Labor, the Labor brand.

“It may not take that long to backfire. When 10 per cent of it is rolled out we will have a good idea of the take-up rate.”

The institute asked the management consultants Howard Partners to examine 18 high-profile federal projects for the quality of decision-making that brought them about. It found 10 deficient – the alcopops tax, Building the Education Revolution, the broadband network, the Darwin to Alice Springs railway, FuelWatch, the green car innovation fund, the green loans program, the home insulation scheme, Grocery Watch and the set-top boxes for pensioners program.

Passing the test were the national disability insurance scheme, the minerals resource rent tax and the emissions trading scheme.

The institute wants projects worth more than $100 million to be subject to a 10-step process.

This year’s frenzy of oil and gas exploration in newly accessible Arctic waters could be the harbinger of even starker changes to come.

If, as many scientists predict, currently inaccessible sea lanes across the top of the world become navigable in the coming decades, they could redraw global trading routes – and perhaps geopolitics – forever.

This summer will see more human activity in the Arctic than ever before, with oil giant Shell engaged in major exploration and an expected further rise in fishing, tourism and regional shipping. But that, experts warn, brings with it a rising risk of environmental disaster not to mention criminal activity from illegal fishing to smuggling and terrorism.

“By bringing more human activity into the Arctic you bring both the good and the bad,” Lt Gen Walter Semianiw, head of Canada Command and one of Ottawa’s most senior military officers responsible for the Arctic, told an event at Washington DC think tank the Centre For Strategic and International Studies last week. “You will see the change whether you wish to or not.”

With indigenous populations, researchers and military forces reporting the ice receding faster than many had expected, some estimates suggest the polar ice cap might disappear completely during the summer season as soon as 2040, perhaps much earlier.

That could slash the journey time from Europe to Chinese and Japanese ports by well over a week, possibly taking traffic from the southern Suez Canal route. But with many of those key sea routes passing through already disputed waters believed to contain much of the world’s untapped energy reserves, some already fear a rising risk of confrontation.

There are fledging signs of growing cooperation — the first ever meeting of Arctic defense chiefs in Canada later this month, joint tabletop exercises on polar search and rescue operations organized through the Arctic Council. But growing unease is also clear.

Norway and Canada, for example, have spent recent years quietly re-equipping its military and moving troops and other forces to new or enlarged bases further north.

Having largely withdrawn most of its forces from the region in the aftermath of the Cold War, officials and experts say the United States is now only just rediscovering its significance.

But for now, Washington has no concrete plans to build even a single new icebreaker – in part because experts estimate the pricetag for a single ship could be as high as $1 billion.

For the first time, some officers worry the United States is losing its foothold as new rivals such as China prepare to muscle in.

“We are in many ways an Arctic nation without an Arctic strategy,” United States Coast Guard Vice Adml Brian M Salerno told the same Washington DC event.

“ARCTIC BATTALIONS”

The United States has yet to ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which most countries use as the basis for discussing thorny Arctic territorial issues.

Arctic experts point to at least nine separate disputes within the region, from disagreements between the United States and Canada over parts of the Northwest passage to fishing conflicts that also drag in China, Russia, South Korea, Japan and others.

Russia in particular is seen to be keen to assert its presence in a region in which it has long been the dominant power.

It operates almost all of the world’s 34 or so icebreakers – albeit many of them ageing Cold War-era vessels, some powered by nuclear reactors that Western experts say could be a major danger in their own right.

Perhaps just as importantly, its navy continues to view the Arctic as its backyard, vital not just for natural resources essential to maintaining Moscow’s economic clout but also the hiding ground for its ballistic missile-carrying nuclear submarine fleet.

But its greatest advantages may be simply demographic.

“They have cities in the Arctic, we only have villages,” says Melissa Bert, U.S. Coast Guard captain and currently a military fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “We simply need more of a presence there.”

Western military strategists have long worried that – if economic woes or unrest at home prompted Russia towards a more bellicose foreign policy – it could escalate regional tensions.

Norway and Russia in particular have long had awkward relations over the Svalbard islands, broadly internationally agreed to be Norwegian but with a growing population of Russian emigres.

This year, Oslo announced it was creating a specialist “Arctic battalion”, explicitly linked to a similar move by Russia’s military just across their shared border.

CONFRONTATION OR COOPERATION?

Some of the most awkward choices, however, will be faced by the Arctic’s least powerful states.

NATO member Iceland raised eyebrows after its 2008 financial implosion when it approached Russia for a bailout, prompting suggestions it might be willing to offer use of a former US airbase and port facilities to Moscow.

Ultimately, it turned instead to the International Monetary Fund and European Union. But similar questions were raised again last year after a Chinese businessman offered to buy a large area of rural Iceland for what he said was a leisure project and golf course.

While he always denied any links to the Chinese government, the sale was ultimately blocked by Icelandic officials citing security concerns.

Greenland, one of Europe’s largest countries but with one of its smallest populations — less than 57,000 people — could face particular challenges.

As its territory opens up more for exploration and mineral extraction, it could find its population swelling rapidly, driven by an influx from Asian investor-countries, notably China.

Nevertheless, some experts believe that if handled properly, the opening of the Arctic could benefit many if not all countries in the northern hemisphere.

“I see the Arctic as ultimately more of a venue for cooperation than confrontation,” says Christian le Miere, senior fellow for maritime affairs at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. “China, Northern Europe, Russia will all benefit in particular from the new sea routes. The only real losers will be countries much further south that cannot take advantage.”

For US Coast Guard captain Bert, having spent much of her career in the north, the greatest real enemies remain the vast distances, harsh climate and lack of resources.

Even with the icecaps gone for some of the year, icebergs will still drift through shipping lanes and harsh storms and poor maps provide ever present danger.

“I don’t worry about a war in the Arctic,” she says. “But I do worry that we’re not prepared to deal with a major disaster there. No one is, but as more people go there, it becomes much more likely.”.

Reuters