Last week the NSW Office of the Coordinator General (very Orwellian) issued a report calling for a new airport for Sydney.

Having never before heard of the OCG, I went to the internet and sure enough there it is. The website says: ‘A key objective of the Office is to ensure alignment between planning, investment and delivery for strategic public and private projects through a coordinated, whole-of-Government focus’.

I suggest that the good people who work in the OCG start off with a coordinated focus between their eyes and the daily newspapers. To predict that ‘more than 68 million air passengers a year are expected by 2023’, shows a blissful ignorance of current aviation trends.

The price of jet fuel is continuing to rise faster than a fully-laden wide-bodied jumbo and there is nothing the airlines can do about it. Flights are being cancelled, planes grounded and staff laid off, not just here but in tourist-producing countries as well.

The Office of the Coordinator General also predicts a doubling of the number of cars using the roads around the airport. Anyone for emissions reduction? Sorry, what’s that? Not your department … go see Penny or Pete you say?

$7 billion for the M4 East inner-city motorway? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Start with the pet project and then commission a rationale to make it seem vital.

The New South Wales government seems to be marching to the beat of a drum that it alone hears. The left ear hears differently to the right ear and the party machine has a completely different song sheet to the caucus. The end result is that community opinion and concerns are going in one ear and out the other.

The same newspaper reporting on the fanciful predictions of the OCG also carried a report by two water experts from the Australian National University criticising the decision to build a desalination plant in Sydney. Once again the government has opted for a big engineering solution when a more honest appraisal of the situation would lead to a cheaper and better outcome.

Water is a vastly undervalued commodity and a sensible government would admit it and put more effort into water capture, conservation and recycling. Burning even more coal to force the salt out of sea water and then pump it from sea level to high dams is costly, inefficient and shows lazy policy making.

Once again, it’s the OCG-type bean counters who look at the number of cars being washed every Sunday in Sydney, multiply that by the number of cars they assume will be out there in twenty years time, using comfortable economic growth figures and then convert it all to megalitres. “See,” they say. “We’re going to need desalination for sure.”

How can we possibly hope to achieve a reduction in carbon emissions when our public policy planners are predicting more and more of the very machines that produce the pollution in the first place?

It sounds like General Uncoordination to me.