As Clarke pointed out, either the East West Link is actually a time machine, or the estimates are garbage. Certainly the link is expensive enough to be a time machine. The estimated cost of the 18-kilometre road is $18 billion – that's $1 billion per kilometre, or $1 million per metre. This compares with the $12 billion cost of the 57-kilometre Gotthard Base Tunnel through the Swiss alps, which is equal to about $211 million a kilometre, or $211,000 a metre.

Apparently it's cheaper to tunnel through rock than mud, but the Gotthard comprises two high-speed rail tunnels, compared with a 4.4-kilometre single tunnel under the Melbourne Cemetery. The dead are sacrosanct. Pity about the desecration of Royal Park due to the open-cut tunnelling for the rest of the road. And a further pity about the spaghetti junction connection with CityLink, which Transurban will widen in return for an extension of its lucrative concession to avoid peak-hour gridlock on the way to the airport.

For its investors, CityLink is the road to riches without peer. Its tolls are indexed by 4.5 per cent a year or the inflation rate, whichever is higher. Its tolls are at least three times the amount necessary to fully finance the road if it had been funded by public debt. And, thanks to the way the concession was structured, Transurban pays very little tax. A leading bank in the project was Macquarie. A chief architect of the contract in the then-government, state treasurer Alan Stockdale, was appointed to Macquarie on his retirement from parliament in 1999.

The East West Link is another financial boondoggle in the making. The government does not intend to ever release its business case, despite its claim that the results show the $18 billion investment for the full road would yield a positive return to the state.

The Labor opposition is as committed to the project as the government, but it pretends to oppose it because it realises that if it openly supports the link, it stands a good chance of losing up to three inner-Melbourne seats directly affected by the road to the Greens. Labor has adopted the position that if it wins the election, it won't cancel the link if the contract is signed by the Coalition government before the election.