NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian; after she made an announcement about the Central Station upgrade. Credit:Peter Braig The most consequential examples of this dynamic in NSW, I think, can be found in decisions made about Sydney's rail system during the Premier's time as transport minister. To get a sense of the issues here, it is worth comparing Berejiklian's rail plans to what she did to the ferries. Berejiklian privatised the running of the ferries. The result seems to have been a success. Ferries arrive on time. They remain embarrassingly pleasant. The government, according to the Auditor-General, saves about 12 per cent a year on running costs. Ticks all round. But imagine if it had not been so easy to privatise the ferries. Imagine a scenario in which, to privatise the ferries, services needed to be suspended for a year. In which commuters were forced onto buses for months so the private operator could replace wharves with ones suited to their preferred vessels. In which these vessels were smaller than the old ones and had fewer seats. And though ferries might arrive more frequently under the private operator, the process lumped taxpayers with a huge bill. Would it still have been worth it to privatise the ferries? It would be worth asking the question.

Illustration John Shakespeare But this is exactly what is happening to Sydney's rail system. And people were never genuinely asked about it. This process started under Berejiklian in May 2011. In that month, her department called for designs of the north west rail link. But the shape of the requested design committed trains on the North West Rail Link to run in only one pattern. The design allowed trains to run only underground from the north west through Epping Station to Chatswood. It did not consider the possibility of trains from the north west running on a second path to the city via Strathfield. Because Sydney's rail tracks are so crowded, this design limited the number of trains that could run on the north west rail link. When the Herald pressed Berejiklian about the implications of her design limitation, she insisted it would not be a problem. But within months, the government used their claim that only four trains an hour could run on the north west rail link as the justification for a decision to overhaul the plans for that line, and for a good chunk of the entire rail system. In order to run more frequent services on the north west, Berejiklian signed off on a plan to hand the existing Epping to Chatswood line to a private operator to run single-deck "metro" trains in a shuttle from the north-west to Chatswood.

This plan in turn triggered a need to extend that new line through the city. And because the trains would need somewhere to run south of the harbour, a decision was made to run them on the Bankstown Line. This series of works, worth about $20 billion, should be finished in 2024. It will of course deliver large benefits, particularly to those areas getting a rail service for the first time. But it will also involve stunning levels of disruption, and shocking levels of waste, as two lines are closed so they can be "upgraded" to run metro trains. Closing a rail line for a year to replace perfectly good, though sometimes liftless, stations? Yes, they actually want to do this. What was never explored was whether Berejiklian could simply have built the north-west rail link to accommodate Sydney's regular trains. Doing so might have delivered substantially the same – or even larger – benefits without the need to close lines. Transport for NSW could have indulged its fetishisation of private metro trains on genuinely stand-alone new rail lines. What's more, other benefits claimed for the coming works are also questionable. The government says that by removing Bankstown Line trains from the City Circle, the project will enable 20 trains an hour to run on the existing Inner West Line and the Airport Line. This claim becomes less impressive on analysis. Already 12 trains an hour run on the Inner West line in the peak hour. To get to 20 an hour, the government would have to stop running express trains to the city from places Lidcombe or Liverpool. This issue could also affect trains from Sydney's south-west. When rail lines start to be closed next year to accommodate the metro "upgrades", there will be a huge campaign to tell the public that the disruption represents the inevitable price of progress.

The propaganda will be false. The closure of those train lines will be because of choices made, and never properly justified, by the current Premier. Jacob Saulwick is city editor.