Protesters: Stop WestConnex, stop WestConnex!! Baird's dirty business police shouldn't be doing!

Paddy Manning: It's another day down on the frontline of the protest against 33 kilometres of tar and tunnels in the biggest and most expensive toll road in Australia's history.

Protesters: Save Sydney Park, save Sydney Park!!

Paddy Manning: The latest uproar is over a seven-lane road coming within two metres of front doors in the inner-city suburb of Alexandria.

Resident: This goes for one lane, or one block rather, seven lanes for one block and then back into four lanes.

Paddy Manning: An extra 50,000 vehicles a day will soon pour out of a giant new tunnel, right next to Euston Road, which is being widened.

Resident: And as you can see, this is our footpath and this is where the road will be going up to. We have less footpath where people live, where people's front doors go onto the footpath who have young children that want to live a normal happy life.

Resident: Mate, have you checked for possums in the trees?

Resident: Wildlife in the trees!

Resident: Where is the report about the possums in the trees?

Paddy Manning: Welcome to the WestConnex motorway, the mega-project that became a political brand, then a private company, and now has its own minister, Stuart Ayres.

Okay, so what's your job description?

Stuart Ayres: Deliver WestConnex on time and on budget, and also ensure that we get a good price for it when we decide to sell down.

Paddy Manning: Since the project was first announced in 2012 there's been constant changes to the plans: a slot design was scrapped, extra lanes and tunnels have been added, major interchanges have been moved and removed, construction 'dive' sites have been proposed and abandoned. And five years later, the public is yet to see a final design for the whole project.

Duncan Gay: Look, we're excited that this is another stage of WestConnex, this is the final key, this is the link between the new M5 and the widened M4. This is what really makes it hum.

Paddy Manning: Duncan Gay, the former NSW minister for roads, announcing another major change to the project late last year, deleting the Camperdown exit closest to the city. Gay was looking on the bright side.

Duncan Gay: And the great thing that we have put together, we were always going to join them but as we've gone we've improved it. The fact is that today we are announcing a project that not only links them but future-proofs them.

Paddy Manning: Reporters asked if the government was done changing the scheme. Duncan Gay gave no guarantees:

Duncan Gay: If it changes again, that will mean we've found a better plan. What we like about it is it's delivering the joining link faster, in an improved way, with greater capacity, and if you have improved a product I think you're doing the right thing.

Paddy Manning: WestConnex grew out of a proposal to provide a tunnel for trucks needing to get from Sydney's western suburbs to the port of Botany, Australia's second-biggest container terminal, and the airport.

Ron Hoenig is a former long-time mayor of Botany, he's now a state MP whose electorate takes in both the port and the airport. He's watched the WestConnex saga unfold.

Ron Hoenig: So the problem with this WestConnex project is the government are making it up as they go along. I mean, initially it was a $10 billion road and it was going to contain these boulevards like Barcelona, and Parramatta Road was going to be this magnificent tree-lined street. The road connecting the M5 was to going to be an above-ground road through the Tempe wetlands. All of a sudden now the boulevard didn't work because they would have had to acquire half of the Inner West.

Paddy Manning: I'm Paddy Manning, and on Background Briefing this week, we're asking whether Australia's largest transport infrastructure project will live up to its promise to reduce Sydney's congestion.

As WestConnex has morphed over the years, the cost has increased, partly due to inflation, and partly due to its greater scope. From a rough initial estimate of $10 billion, the cost rose quickly to $12 billion, then to $15 billion and now it's $17 billion, more expensive per kilometre than the Channel Tunnel. And it could rise further if tenders on stage three, the most expensive, come in higher than expected.

What is the guarantee that stage three will come in at the forecast $7.2 billion and won't blow out to something more like, say, $10 billion?

Dennis Cliche: None whatsoever. We do our best, we've gone through extensive, exhaustive analysis, planning. One hopes (touch wood) that we'll be able to deliver it on time, on budget, but in mega projects…I'm confident we will, but you just look around, read the papers every day, mega projects are mega difficult, and mega difficult to deliver on time and on budget.

Paddy Manning: That's WestConnex boss Dennis Cliche, and we'll hear more from him later.

The NSW government will shortly confirm that WestConnex will be partly sold off in a multi-billion deal. Up for grabs is the right to slug motorists with expensive tolls that are guaranteed to rise; 4% every year for the next 43 years.

It's not just the WestConnex tunnels that will be tolled. For the first time, existing free public roads will also be tolled to fund the project, including the state-owned M4.

Stephen Bali: Look, the M4 toll was taken off a number of years ago because it was paid for, more than two or three times over we paid for the M4 at that time.

Paddy Manning: That's Stephen Bali, mayor of Blacktown and president of the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils.

Stephen Bali: And the government realised it was just a tax for living out in the west, so that got removed under the Labor government. Now the Liberal government's reintroduced the toll based on minor extensions. We're really just getting one lane either way.

Paddy Manning: As we crawl along the stretch of the M4 that is being widened, we get a timely reminder that the tolls are coming back.

Okay, we've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 lanes of traffic coming together here. What's the speedo say?

Stephen Bali: 15 ks and we've gone about 4 kilometres since we got on what was at 3:11 we got on. [BEEP] There you go, they're conditioning me for that toll, they've already beeped and said 'We're not going to charge you yet, aren't you lucky! You've got a couple of months for free.' But in July we will be paying full freight for driving along at 10 kilometres an hour.

Paddy Manning: Ron Hoenig thinks Western Sydney motorists will be bitterly disappointed.

Ron Hoenig: They don't know their problem's not going to be solved, all they see is people in the inner city complaining about the impact and having their houses taken, they see construction going on. They're like people in a desert who think they see an oasis, well, drink the sand and that's what's happening. They think in Western Sydney that there's this solution coming, but I'm here to tell you there's no solution coming, it's not intended to come.

Paddy Manning: WestConnex was conceived in 2012 and the number one objective was to give better access to trucks travelling from the port of Botany and Sydney airport to the industrial areas in the west. At the time, Paul Broad, then head of Infrastructure NSW, explained this to the ABC TV's 7.30 Report:

Paul Broad: The most important roads in the country are the M4 and M5. Both effectively end at dead ends. The M5 is a car park for 12 hours a day. To sustain our competitiveness, we have to link those roads, not only for allowing the free movement of passengers, but to free up Botany and the airport.

Paddy Manning: As the 2013 federal election approached, both sides of politics jumped on board, promising $1.5 billion in commonwealth funding. This was before the WestConnex business case had been prepared, and despite the fact that Infrastructure Australia had put the project in the lowest-priority category.

When he became Prime Minister, Tony Abbott ensured WestConnex got a $2 billion loan on very favourable terms, well below market interest rates.

Dennis Cliche says it was a timely intervention to kick-start thousands of construction jobs.

Dennis Cliche: So I think the previous prime minister made it quite clear that he wanted to support infrastructure, they wanted to get jobs going, and ironically, you look at the mining boom, the mining boom has come off, you read the local papers now, where are those guys working? In Sydney here.

Paddy Manning: Today WestConnex is the sole survivor of three controversial new toll roads given a funding boost by Tony Abbott in the 2014 budget. The other two, Melbourne's East West Link, and the Perth Freight Link, known as Roe 8, were axed by incoming state Labor governments. None of those toll roads had been ticked off by Infrastructure Australia, the body set up to provide an independent assessment of the costs and benefits of major national projects. Transport expert Peter Newman was on the board at the time.

Peter Newman: Then we had the election with Tony Abbott where he announced $40 billion or so of major roads, and that Infrastructure Australia would have a new act which would guarantee their independence. However, that didn't happen because they certainly cleaned out a whole lot of people from the board and then proceeded to insist that these roads needed to be on the list and given the tick of approval.

Paddy Manning: Professor Peter Newman says it was beside the point that Tony Abbott had included the roads as election promises.

Peter Newman: Yeah, he clearly had a mandate but that didn't mean that Infrastructure Australia needed to say 'yes they're the best thing that's ever happened'. They were totally dreamed up, and when prime ministers design roads it's not necessarily the right thing for a city, and that was certainly the case in these three roads.

Paddy Manning: At state and federal level, the auditor general raised red flags about conflicts of interest and the lack of independent assessment of the business case for WestConnex.

Bypassing Infrastructure Australia, the federal infrastructure department shovelled money at WestConnex, whether agreed milestones were met or not. And the concessional loan cost taxpayers $640 million in foregone interest.

But WestConnex only got less transparent and accountable: it was set up as a private company, beyond the scrutiny of parliament, the auditor-general, ICAC or the public through freedom of information laws.

Meanwhile, Infrastructure Australia's board was abolished and the legislation rewritten. Professor Newman found his urban rail expertise was no longer required.

Were you given any reason as to why you wouldn't be required any longer on that board?

Peter Newman: No, I was not given any reason, no, no one discussed it with me at all…but no, they weren't keen to have me there.

Paddy Manning: The only board member of Infrastructure Australia retained by the Abbott government was then deputy chair Mark Birrell, a former Liberal Party politician who was a cabinet minister in the Kennett government. He's now chairman.

Newman watched from the outside as Infrastructure Australia re-rated all three of Tony Abbott's toll roads as 'high priority' projects.

Peter Newman: So I don't know how they were convinced to then analyse these projects and give them a big tick. It certainly seemed to me to be inappropriate, and in the case of the Perth Freight Link we now know that they approved and said 'this is a high priority project' without having a proper business case because the business case still hasn't been given to them, and yet they announced it as a very high priority project.

Paddy Manning: Professor Newman isn't critical of any individual board member, but believes the process for the Perth Freight Link was politicised.

Peter Newman: So that's political interference, that's not what Infrastructure Australia was set up to do.

Paddy Manning: Infrastructure Australia declined to speak with Background Briefing.

The recent federal budget confirmed that borrowings will be reclassified as good debt (for capital investments) and bad debt (for recurrent spending). It's clever accounting, but it only puts more importance on the role of Infrastructure Australia, doing independent, cost-benefit assessments to decide which projects cut the mustard.

Back on Euston Road, in Sydney's inner west, it is clear that a lack of transport planning has real-world consequences.

Resident: We were asked to come to a meeting on the 8 March in 2017, so twelve months into the process, and at that time they told us they had one design plan, no other options, one design plan which they'd settled on, although this was meant to be a consultation, and that design plan would bring the road to within 1.8 metres of our buildings here with 90 apartments, and that all the trees of course would go. There would be no barriers, nothing to mitigate the noise or to help with safety on the perimeter of the road, and it would come so close to our buildings, that with such a volume of traffic, 70,000 vehicles a day, that it wouldn't be wise to open our windows, we shouldn't open our windows because it would be dangerous to do so.

Paddy Manning: Because of the fumes?

Resident: Yes.

Paddy Manning: Residents knew about the road reservation, but say the WestConnex scheme goes three metres wider.

That's rejected by the new minister for WestConnex, Stuart Ayres, who is member for Penrith and minister for Western Sydney.

Stuart Ayres: Euston Road is an important road for distributing traffic around southern Sydney. And with or without WestConnex, I think it's fair to say that Euston Road would've been widened.

Paddy Manning: They say you haven't met with them.

Stuart Ayres: No, I haven't been and met with those individual residents. But we have had members from our community engagement team. And I know that in the last week we've done a number of additional door-knocking and individual engagements with people in that building.

Paddy Manning: Residents say they won't give contractors access to the building until they get their meeting with the minister.

The construction chaos will end eventually, and WestConnex says more trees will be replanted than are being cut down. What's irreplaceable are the 427 homes that have been or will be compulsorily acquired. They were often bought for well below market value, and advice the government kept confidential for two years found the process was flawed.

WestConnex CEO Dennis Cliche told Background Briefing that RMS, Roads and Maritime Services, is responsible for home acquisitions and valuations. Cliche is sympathetic, without being apologetic:

Dennis Cliche: Just as a personal story, I've been evicted twice since I've been up in Sydney, two and a half years I've been here. I've had to move twice because the owners sold the house that I was renting. So I know all about forced eviction. I went to buy a house that I was renting and I said, well, I'll get in one of the valuers from RMS, and the owner at the time said, 'No way, those people, I read about it in the papers, they screw everybody over and they lowball,' and came in 15% higher than what it actually sold for.

Paddy Manning: Right.

Dennis Cliche: That was their valuation, so…

Paddy Manning: That's no answer, is it, to people who feel that they've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on their home which is their only asset…

Dennis Cliche: Well, let me finish though. When you don't want to sell your house, I don't think there's a price, within reason, that would ever make you want to sell your house. So I take issue with statements that we've undervalued and deliberately not given them the market price, I take issue with that. Do we give people an amount of money in a forced acquisition where they walk away singing and saying, 'I'm happy'? Arguably, no. I mean, I wouldn't be happy either.

Paddy Manning: Building a $17 billion tollway in a city of 5 million people is bound to cause disruption, but minister for WestConnex, Stuart Ayres, says the pain will be worthwhile.

Stuart Ayres: From my perspective, there's a bit of a tale of two cities about WestConnex. There's the communities that are actually having to live in the construction site as we build simply the largest infrastructure project in Australia. Then it's also about benefiting residents of Sydney that don't live anywhere near the construction site. So the primary benefits for WestConnex are going to be delivered to people who live in southwestern Sydney, places like Campbelltown and Liverpool. If you're living along the M4 corridor, if you live in Parramatta or Blacktown or Penrith, you're going to be the major beneficiary of having this piece of infrastructure completed. And the other group of people that benefit hugely from this project are our commercial and professional drivers that are moving products and services all the way around the city on a daily basis.

Paddy Manning: Background Briefing hit the road to speak with some of the people who are supposed to benefit the most from WestConnex.

If Sydney is two cities, there is no doubt whose side Blacktown Mayor Stephen Bali is on. He's the president of the Western Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils, and he's western suburbs born and bred.

Stephen Bali: G'day Paddy, how are ya, and all the listeners.

Paddy Manning: Okay, so what are we driving?

Stephen Bali: SSV Redline Holden.

Paddy Manning: What year?

Stephen Bali: 2016.

Paddy Manning: One of the last Holdens I suppose.

Bali is not opposed to WestConnex, but he argues distance-based tolls are unfair on western suburbs motorists, who have to travel further. He says there should be a weekly cap on the tolls people pay, and toll road operators should only get paid a premium if they actually deliver a faster trip.

Stephen Bali: We're just simply saying, well, if you're paying to use a road, and as we can see the westbound traffic is just bumper to bumper, why should you be paying full freight when you're not getting the satisfaction out of the road? So we're saying that if the road is bumper to bumper then the price should drop.

Paddy Manning: After two decades building private toll roads, Sydney has eight different tolling regimes with no rationale.

Stephen Bali: There's three ways from Western Sydney to get into Sydney. Depending which route you take, it can end up between $8 to $21 to get into Sydney. Really it doesn't make any logical sense of having so many different pricing structures.

Paddy Manning: Driving westbound on Sydney's M4 we finally got back to Parramatta:

3.41. How far have we gone, Steve, so that's half an hour?

Stephen Bali: Yeah, 7 ks, so the NMRA wasn't that far wrong when they said about 17.5 kilometres, we'll be doing about 14.

Paddy Manning: The other group of supposed beneficiaries is truck drivers, and their most important destination is Port Botany, where road freight volumes are expected to triple.

WestConnex was meant to provide better freight access to Port Botany, but Marika Calfas, CEO of NSW Ports, is still waiting for a solution to her bottleneck, where the main road in and out of the Port, Foreshore Road, joins the rest of the city's road network

Marika Calfas: So Port Botany's key road constraint is the end of Foreshore Road, the primary access point, where it joins into General Holmes Drive, and the majority of the trucks leaving the port or arriving to the port, they're coming from the direction which is the M5 east route. The WestConnex project as currently designed doesn't deal with the intersection that is currently the key bottleneck for Port Botany.

Paddy Manning: Currently, WestConnex stops 8 kilometres away at St Peters. We went on the road with a driver from one of Australia's biggest trucking companies, Linfox, which delivers for the Kelloggs plant at Botany, across the road from the port. As we carted Sultana Bran out the M5 to Smeaton Grange, I spoke to driver Ilco Joleski about the new interchange at St Peters:

And so WestConnex coming up at Canal Road there, is that going to help?

Ilco Joleski: It's a good question, I can't answer that, good question. We're just going to have to wait and see.

Paddy Manning: It's a fair way from the port, though?

Ilco Joleski: That's right, yes.

Paddy Manning: At 5am the Bayview Cafe is busy with truck drivers working around the Port. I asked a few of them about WestConnex. Graeme Ciphers has done container work out of the port for 25 years.

Graeme Ciphers: Well, the way it looks to me…like I go out there a fair bit…as far as I'm concerned it's out of date now. I don't think they're putting enough effort in...it should be at least 4 or 5 lanes, both sides, to do any good. they've got to look 10, 20 years ahead. The way it looks to me now, 5 years, it'll be no good, they'll be back to square one, as far as I'm concerned, for all that money they're spending.

Paddy Manning: He also says WestConnex new M5 tunnel should go to the port, rather than coming up at St Peters as the maps now show.

Graeme Ciphers: That's not going to really help us if what they're doing is coming out of there and directing the traffic back towards to the city. We don't have to go the city, we've got to come back this way. I think they should build a tunnel underneath Qantas there and bring us out to Foreshore.

Paddy Manning: Ron Hoenig, who was mayor of Botany for 30 years, has argued the same thing for decades.

Ron Hoenig: Firstly the location…where the St Peters interchange is currently being constructed is where the government more than 20 years ago wanted the M5 east to come out. So it was me and the Southern Regional Organisation of Councils that convinced the government to move the M5 east to General Holmes Drive. So that location would have been an absolute disaster. When Mike Baird and Tony Abbott announced this location for an interchange, it was like going back 25 years to the same stupidity that had been floating around 25 years ago. It is the worst possible location to allow 61,000 vehicles into residential streets. It's just going to be a catastrophe.

Paddy Manning: Hoenig wants the new M5 tunnel to come out near the port and the airport. Marika Calfas agrees that would be great but, if not, more money will need to be spent.

Marika Calfas: Well, from a port perspective that would be great, it'd be nice to connect in then to Foreshore Road quite well. So that is something that ideally would help to serve that key bottleneck that we're talking about, but it's not the only way you can deal with that bottleneck.

Paddy Manning: WestConnex says the solution will come with the $800 million Sydney Gateway project, which is being handled by the state roads department. But the Gateway isn't designed yet and it will be the last part of WestConnex completed, in around 2023.

Trucks wanting to get to the Botany port have another problem with WestConnex. If they don't use the new M5 tunnel, because it comes up too far away from Botany, WestConnex engineers told Background Briefing truckers will mostly use the old M5 East tunnel. But an increasing number of trucks are over-height; already trucks get stuck in the existing M5 tunnel, which is low and steep. I put this to WestConnex boss Dennis Cliche:

Is that a major miscalculation in your planning, that you haven't taken into account the needs of those over-height trucks?

Dennis Cliche: Well, I don't know who you talked to and what level of knowledge they had in what was behind it and I suspect if it was one of our engineers, it was probably not the most well informed commentary. We've made those tunnels 5.3 metres high, we've made sure that there's 4% grade, not 8% like on the other one, for trucks.

Paddy Manning: Yes, it's a paradox though, isn't it? It's a beautiful new tunnel for over-height trucks but it goes to the wrong spot.

Dennis Cliche: Well, it goes to the wrong spot if we don't do anything at the interchange at St Peters where you come out and you go to the port.

Paddy Manning: With WestConnex tunnels coming up at Rozelle and St Peters, the motorway's critics have a strong line of attack: after $17 billion, it still doesn't go to the city, and it still doesn't go to the port.

At a rally to protest the toll road outside Parliament House, they were in full voice.

I put this to Tony Shepherd, the former chair of the WestConnex Delivery Authority.

Is it a road to nowhere?

Tony Shepherd: No, it's not. Look, let's get back to the basics of why, what was it invented to do, what is its intention? The main intention is to provide a bypass to the city to the west of the city. If we look at our roads at the present time, our major routes at the moment, the Sydney Harbour crossing is at capacity, that's the tunnel and the bridge, the Eastern Distributor is at capacity, the Western Distributor is almost at capacity, as is the Anzac Bridge. And so to provide a link to the south of the city on the western side made great sense.

Paddy Manning: But a western bypass of the CBD was not among the seven objectives listed in the original proposal for WestConnex. One chart did show an earlier idea for an inner west bypass, but it had a totally different route and was also just a line on a map.

City of Sydney transport planner Terry Lee Williams has previously worked for NSW Transport and the RTA in a 30-year career. He explains how WestConnex has evolved.

Terry Lee Williams: You can tell by what the original proposal was to do, which was essentially a Marrickville truck tunnel in 2000 to 2004 to get trucks from the M4 to Port Botany and vice versa, and to pay for that they've had to put cars onto the road, and cars pay for the building that you wouldn't get through the revenue from trucks because there just aren't enough trucks. But the problem you have is when you have cars they go everywhere, trucks go to very certain locations, but cars have to go in every direction everywhere to attract people into the thing, and so it grows and grows and grows. And that's why the current WestConnex, which is this network of roads, doesn't actually serve the original function, it doesn't actually connect to the port.

Paddy Manning: He says WestConnex will just move the congestion around.

Terry Lee Williams: I guess what you would call the planning model of road planners has long been that you create the next congestion point that creates a crisis, the crisis creates money, you get to build another road. And in bringing the M4 and M5 together through WestConnex it creates a link that wasn't necessary for car traffic, it was very necessary for truck traffic, and in doing so it brings congestion very close to the western edge of the city. In fact the Anzac Bridge, which has been operating at capacity for nearly a decade now, is somehow expected to take an extra 18,000 to 20,000 vehicles a day, which is clearly not possible, and so something then has to be done because a crisis has been created, and that leads us to the Western Harbour Tunnel.

Paddy Manning: The City of Sydney reckons the true cost of WestConnex is now more like $45 billion if you factor in the expensive new toll roads that will be necessary to clear traffic, including the Western Harbour Tunnel, Northern Beaches link and Southern Connector.

Last year the city commissioned consultants SGS to review the WestConnex business case. It found the benefit was around $1.10 for every dollar invested, marginal, and much less than the claimed benefit of $1.71 for every dollar put in.

I asked WestConnex CEO Dennis Cliche about the SGS analysis:

The City of Sydney commissioned traffic planners SGS to study that business case and they said that the best congestion improvement was 3% for heavy vehicles in the AM peak along the M5, and that 60% of the travel time savings you estimated were below five minutes.

Dennis Cliche: Yeah. Well, I have to be careful because I don't want to bag another professional firm, but at the time that work was done, I estimated we had done in excess of 12 man-years of traffic planning, or people-years, I don't want to use the term 'man-years'. We had used 12 years' worth of traffic modelling, taking all of the RMS data, putting that in, and doing the model. I think SGS was given something like six weeks.

Paddy Manning: Did they make any mistakes?

Dennis Cliche: I don't think it's a question of mistakes, it's a question of time to analyse stuff and to come to proper conclusions that we would debate.

Paddy Manning: WestConnex has engaged SGS on the design of the Rozelle interchange, part of the stage 3. SGS declined to comment to Background Briefing.

Surprisingly, during our interview Dennis Cliche turned the tables and asked me a question.

Dennis Cliche: When are you going to ask me for my salary?

Paddy Manning: Yeah, I was going to save that til last.

Dennis Cliche: Ah, setting me up have you?

Paddy Manning: Not really because I think of course you would see it coming. But what are you paid, Dennis?

Dennis Cliche: I'm paid a base of $717,500.

Paddy Manning: Right, so it's all bonus.

Dennis Cliche: No. So what would you define as an appropriate all bonus for the largest transport project in Australia? What would you say? $700,000 base, so how much bonus?

Paddy Manning: If you put me on the spot I would say…

Dennis Cliche: We're spending $200 million a month, have 3,000 people on the job today.

Paddy Manning: I would say somewhere between 30% and 60% of your remuneration would be bonus.

Dennis Cliche: Spot on, 55%.

Paddy Manning: Adding up his short-term bonus of 35%, and a long-term retention bonus of 20%, Dennis Cliche will earn a salary of $1.16 million a year, higher than any NSW public servant.

Meanwhile, Background Briefing can reveal that the City of Sydney has proposed an alternative scheme, on which the Lord Mayor Clover Moore recently briefed the Premier. Background Briefing has obtained a copy of the 28-page proposal.

By avoiding stage three, which will connect the M4 to the new M5 tunnel, the City's plan could literally save NSW, and therefore motorists, billions. The City says the St Peters site, an asbestos-ridden former tip which has now been remediated by WestConnex, should be sold off for housing.

If a new M5 tunnel is needed at all, says the City's transport adviser Terry Lee Williams, it should come out at the port as originally envisaged, and connect via the Eastern Distributor to the CBD.

Is it realistic to ask WestConnex to stop on the construction of the new M5 at this point?

Terry Lee Williams: I think it's critical so that investors aren't misled and don't end up trying to support a project that doesn't actually connect and deliver what it needs to make money, never mind for the public. What's the public getting out of a road going to the wrong place? It would be I would guess a sign of true leadership to say actually we had it right in the first place and we should go back to the original plan. I don't think it is impossible, I think it's very difficult, as opposed to stage 3 which doesn't exist in any form, it has no plan, it has no EIS, it's not been publicly displayed to anybody, nobody really knows yet what it is, that's much easier to pull the pin on right now.

Paddy Manning: Minister Ayres says road headers are in the ground and the new M5 will be built along its planned alignment. And he is adamant stage 3 will go ahead.

Is there a prospect that the M4-M5 link won't be built?

Stuart Ayres: Not from my perspective, there isn't. The government is absolutely committed to delivering the M4-M5 link. It is, in my mind, the most important part of the WestConnex project. It is clearly the most obvious missing piece in the Sydney motorway network.

Paddy Manning: It's bitterly opposed by local residents in the inner city and it's opposed by the City of Sydney. What if you don't get your way? What would be the impact of completion of stage 1 and stage 2, bringing all that extra traffic into the inner city without building stage 3?

Stuart Ayres: Oh well, extending the M4 and duplicating the M5 without connecting the two, would be an unmitigated disaster. It would lead all of that traffic on those two motorways, that southwestern motorway and the M5, all you would be doing is pushing more traffic through it. Yes, a widened tunnel and you'll definitely improve travel times there, but you wouldn't be able to distribute that traffic anywhere. That will mean that that tunnel will bank back up, very similar to what the existing M5 looks like now. Same thing would happen with the M4. You'd get further down the line, but the bank up would still happen as you got to the bottleneck. Without that North-South distributor, that will free up the opportunity for us to connect into future road programs like the Western Harbour Tunnel, like the Southern Distributor road. That's where we get our maximum bang for our buck, that's where we get the real value in this project, and that's where we actually complete the existing motorway network in Sydney. If you don't do that, then WestConnex simply won't work.

Paddy Manning: The Minister urges the City to take responsibility for how it interacts with the rest of Sydney. But Terry Lee Williams says the City is taking its responsibilities seriously, and WestConnex is working against, not for, the policy objectives it shares with the NSW government.

Is the city stepping beyond its remit here? Is this really an issue for the ratepayers of the City of Sydney?

Terry Lee Williams: The ratepayers of the City of Sydney are two lots of people, and people forget the biggest ratepayers and that's the businesses, and businesses rely on the city functioning very well and smoothly. On global scales and measures of amenity for cities, you know, how good is the City of Sydney compared to everybody else, we've been sliding down the scale very rapidly over the past six years. So we used to rank number 1 to number 3 on every global scale for cities, we're now lucky to crack the top 10 and the significant difference is transport. We just can't get workers in and out of the city in a timely, predictable manner. 87% of those people coming in and out of the city come by public transport, walk or cycle, very few of them drive. We need more public transport to solve that problem, and that's why we are campaigning so hard on this. We don't want to bury all of the public funds and all of the private funds available to invest in transport infrastructure into roads projects, because if we lose our status as the global city of Australia, the 25% of the state economy that gets punted straight out of the City of Sydney and the billion dollars' worth of stamp duty that gets paid each year to the state government will start to evaporate, and that affects everybody in the state, and we take that responsibility very seriously.

Paddy Manning: Background Briefing's co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness, sound engineer this week is Andrei Shabunov, our executive producer is Wendy Carlisle, and I'm Paddy Manning.