Is Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas our very own version of US Republican political advisor Karl Rove? Rove famously dismissed critics of the Bush administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq with: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously if you will – we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we can do."

Victoria is no empire, but how else to explain the gulf between the government's promises and its secretive actions on the Western Distributor road and the Port of Melbourne privatisation. These two projects, taken together, will transform inner western Melbourne for the worse, and lock us into an ugly private port and freeway complex abutting the city, delivering windfall profits for decades to the private beneficiaries while perpetuating urban blight.

Before the last state election, Labor issued in its transport policy, Project 10,000, including a promise to build a modest $500 million Westgate Distributor that would take trucks from the port away from the city centre and put them on the freeway system without going through residential streets in Yarraville.

We now know that Pallas was in talks before the election with Transurban on a very different project with a similar name: the $5.5 billion Western Distributor. Its primary purpose is not to take trucks away from the city and suburbs but to bring cars into the CBD and profits into Transurban's coffers.