Critics of the NSW government’s transport entity have been left vindicated after the state’s auditor-general found it overly costly and ineffective.
The NSW government shoehorned the rollout of its controversial transport corporation to match benefits promised in 2015 budget papers, the state’s auditor-general has found, rendering a seven-year government implementation process overly costly, ineffective and opaque.
In a report handed down Tuesday, the NSW government was found to have committed future governments to ongoing financial obligations when it established the Transport Asset Holding Entity (TAHE) in order to deliver a $1.8 billion sugar hit to the 2015-16 budget, without certainty it would deliver “longer-term financial improvements”.
The government established TAHE as a state-owned corporation to manage the state’s various transport assets in 2020, in a bid to move billions of dollars in transport costs out of the state budget.
Sign up to keep reading.
Get independent journalism throughout 2023. Sign up for your first 12 weeks of Crikey for $12.
Join us
Already a subscriber? Log in to keep reading.
Discussion about this post