Of all the incompetence and waste unveiled by Phillip Strachan's Inquiry into the Queensland Rail fiasco, the most frightening thing of all is how the Rail, Tram and Bus Union was allowed to run riot in QR.



While we are told that the problem was due to the extra burden of running trains on the Moreton Bay line, the truth actually lies somewhere deeper.



The Moreton Bay line added just 12km of extra rail to a passenger network in south-east Queensland that totals 520km.



The problem was that QR was already understaffed due to operating conditions imposed on QR by the union. These operating conditions were crippling.



The details contained in the report show the extent to which the union was allowed to run riot with our commuter network.



Queensland Rail is an organisation which is totally dependent on overtime to get the trains to run at all, on any given day. In fact, the overtime bill for drivers alone is running at around $500,000 a fortnight, with more again for the guards. In fact, in the first two wages weeks in October last year, QR paid $578,752.41 in overtime to just 379 drivers. That works out at an average of $1527 a fortnight in overtime each.



Of course there wouldn't need to be so much overtime paid if there were more drivers, but that's what the union didn't want to happen. In fact, the union put all sorts of impediments in place to stop more drivers being recruited. For example, drivers weren't allowed to come in from other states; drivers had to be recruited from existing QR guards; and those guards had to be replaced by other QR staff.



Add that to an outdated training scheme that is absurdly long. For example, it takes an average of 18 months to train a QR driver, whereas it takes the Germans - who have one of the best rail systems in the world - just nine months.



The whole overtime dilemma was engineering by the union (forgive the pun) to extract absurd amounts of overtime from a government that had given them a sly wink to get away with whatever they could.



If you think this is just political banter, you're dead wrong. Mr Strachan found that driver productivity dropped 7 per cent between the 2015 election and now. This was due entirely to renegotiated work conditions which reduced the amount of time drivers spent actually driving trains. In fact, just 29 per cent of a driver's time is spent driving, and the rest is spent doing something else.



And presiding over it all was a minister who was happy to rely on assurances from QR, without being able to show once that he ever asked the right questions of the QR board and management.



Labor is captive to the railway union, and we are all paying for it, every day of the week.