By Andrew Herington
In a major development, 38 boxes of documents related to the WestConnex Business Case were delivered into the safekeeping of the NSW Clerk of Parliaments on Tuesday evening.
16 of the boxes are privileged (only MLCs can look) but the contents of the other 22 boxes can be viewed by the public from Friday 28th.
This follows the successful “call for papers” by the NSW Legislative Council, where Greens, Labor and Shooters and Fishers MLCs voted three weeks ago to use the power of Parliament to pry open the door of government secrecy.
WestConnex is a proposed 33 kilometre, $10 billion freeway in Sydney’s western and southern suburbs which was announced in December 2012 as NSW’s “highest priority” for infrastructure.
The parallels with Melbourne’s East West Link are powerful – including the promise of huge federal funding being made at the last election without a public business case. Unlike Melbourne the release of these documents will enable some scrutiny of the proposal.
The community coalition WestConAction group has a team of 20 volunteers who will start analysing the papers from today – so there should be significant media and on-line coverage over the next few days.
There are in the order of 9,000 documents. The 717 page index can be downloaded through the link below. It’s a 20mb pdf file!
Whilst it will never make the best seller list, clearly there is a lot of information in the boxes which WestConnex has been telling the public for months it didn’t have and much more we had no idea about until now…
NSW Legislative Council Tabled Paper
The parallels to the situation with the East West Link are very strong. The Government has used its numbers in the Victorian Parliament to prevent a similar motion being moved here and the efforts to move a similar motion in relation to the East West Link Business case have yet to come to a head. Meanwhile the key decisions remain before the Assessment Committee without them having the benefit of much information in the possession of the LMA.
East West Link Blog 
Is there a link to the COMMUNITY GROUP’s website, where they will presumably document their efforts at dissecting the documents?
At least there is some democracy in NSW. We will keep pushing for the release of documents relating to the business case in Vic