Barnaby Joyce
Barnaby Joyce (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

That loud droning coming from the ministerial wing of Parliament House in Canberra is the sound of dozens of microwave ovens being pressed into service: it’s that time of the electoral cycle when the Great Policy Reheat fires up.

Tragically unexploited by reality TV so far, the Great Policy Reheat sees ministerial staffers lining up a huge variety of policies at the office microwave, ready to reheat them to offer them to the public all over again, knowing full well the public and journalists won’t recall that they’ve been “unveiled” previously — sometimes on multiple occasions.

Some have been reheated so often the edges of the announcement have gone hard as steel and the innards have turned to a stolid, flavourless mulch.

Staff in Barnaby Joyce’s office were busy at the microwave yesterday, preparing another announcement of investment in the sealing of the Outback Way, a highway from WA to Queensland across the middle of Australia. Now, if they could seal that dirt road with the Coalition’s announcements, they might have made more rapid progress on a project that actually began under Anthony Albanese when he was Infrastructure minister in the Rudd-Gillard years. Today Joyce was boasting of “an additional $678 million to seal another 1000 kilometres”.

That it came right after Albanese committed Labor to $200 million in Northern Territory road projects if he won was pure coincidence.

Optimistically, we were told by spruikers for the project that it would cost $600 million in total in 2017, but the government has been pumping a lot more than that in, starting off small — $11 million here, $20 million there — then $100 million announced in the 2016 election, then $160 million in 2018. You can barely navigate the Department of Infrastructure for Outback Way sealing and upgrade announcements dating back years.

The sealing of the Outback Way is undoubtedly a win for a small number of remote Indigenous communities who use it, as well as the beef and freight industries that would be more likely to use a sealed road, and the limited number of tourists who want to drive cross Australia without going across the Nullarbor. But is it the best investment of $1 billion in transport infrastructure, compared to dozens of other projects across the country?

Well, good luck answering that question because Infrastructure Australia has never assessed the project, which was only added to its project list at the start of 2021 anyway.

In fact, almost certainly the benefit:cost ratio would be close to zero given the limited traffic the road carries and would carry even when upgraded. But what it can guarantee is the delivery of a regular series of announcements into the future as governments of either side bid to be the ones to pave the Outback Way.

Based on the historical volumes of Outback Way announcement, speech mentions and public references, we’re running at around $10 million an announcement — and that’s a bargain for any politician.