Yesterday, in her address to the National Press Club [see previous LP discussion here], Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a point of stating that any concessions to the Independents involving expenditure would be funded from savings, and there would be no resulting change to the budget bottom line. She revived her argument made during the election campaign that the Coalition had reached new heights of fiscal irresponsibility, promising a billion a day in un-costed spending.

All this comes as the Reserve Bank Deputy Governor warns of the possibility of a double dip recession, and the latest economic stats show that from the perspective of many regions around the nation, we’re definitely in the two-speed economy space.

Politically, Gillard is tweaking the notion of stability to encompass economic management.

Tony Abbott has refused to match Gillard’s budget pledge.

Gillard has also used her response to Andrew Wilkie’s list of demands, and Bob Katter’s protectionist musings, to underline a claim that Labor does not intend to go on a spendathon to secure government, or to depart from what the ALP believes to be sound principles of economic policy.

These moves in the game highlight the importance of the costings issue, and also represent an attempt to leverage claims about the “unedifying spectacle” of pork-barreling the Indies’ seats – emanating from both business and the media – into a different story about the Coalition’s preparedness to buy its way into office.

The credibility of that particular narrative has been somewhat enhanced by the loud urgings of Nationals MPs and Senators earlier in the week that they get what they see as their rightful share of pork.

Labor, it should be added, is not quite coming to this debate with clean hands. The now notorious Epping-Paramatta rail link certainly didn’t emerge out of the assessment and prioritisation process purportedly driven by Infrastructure Australia. But as Wayne Swan said during the campaign, the Coalition outdid itself in promises directed at particular electorates, many of which appeared not on the website of the Liberal party itself, but only through press releases by Members and candidates. Any tally of those would probably add to the billion dollars a day cost of the opposition’s promises, particularly since no attempt whatsoever was made to identify how they would be funded.

Update: Bob Katter’s demands.

The first, splashed on the front pages of the Herald Sun, is a new freeway, is a leak from the Victorian Goverment’s transport plan. It joins the recently built Eastlink tollway in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, to the Mornington Peninsula freeway in Melbourne’s far south-eastern fringes, bypassing the suburbs of Carrum Downs, Frankston and Mount Eliza. The government wants federal money, from infrastructure Australia, for the project to build it without charging tolls. The second, put together by the Cycling Promotion Fund, a consortium of bicycle-related businesses big and small, proposes to spend a similar amount of money over four years building cycling infrastructure across Australia’s big cities, with the goal of “a doubling of cycling trips in capital cities by 2012 and tripling cycling trips by 2029 based on the 2006 census data.”

While it’s perhaps unfair to compare a public submission by what I imagine is a relatively small lobbying organization to a state government-backed inquiry can do, it strikes me that there’s a fundamental weakness in this document, and most proposals for large investments in cycling infrastructure over the years. The result is usually a pat on the head and a dribbling of money for cyclists, with the rivers of money continuing to go to the road builders.

When the Victorian government puts together its submission to Infrastructure Australia, it will have the combined resources of Vicroads, Treasury, and any external consultants desired, to crunch the numbers on the project, and provide an estimate on the project costs and benefits, and translate the benefits to a dollar figure. The earlier Eddington Report proposals had just such documents. Infrastructure Australia will presumably be able to run a ruler over their figures, compare it to similar projects around Australia, and determine whether it offers a good return to the community on the investment. Sure, that estimate will probably not properly account for pollution costs and the like, but there’s numbers for the beancounters!

The proposal does try to place the benefits of cycling in a financial context to keep the aforementioned beancounters happy, by calculating the effects of the reduced congestion, energy usage, pollution, and the improvement in health outcomes per kilometer of cycling compared to car usage. On this basis, they calculate the effects of achieving their targets of increased patronage, compare it to the costs of the infrastructure, and come out with rather impressive-looking cost-benefit ratios. But – and here’s the large but – they don’t present a quantitative case to establish that the level of spending proposed would cause the increase in cycling that they target. Undoubtedly, the general principle that building bike paths increases cycling is sound. But there’s no particular indication of how much you need to spend, and where, to achieve the desired benefits.

So, where does that leave us? For cycling advocates, there’s clearly a need for better information about the quantitative effects of various types of bike trails on ridership levels, allowing a more solid financial case to be made. But it just might be that such data is too hard to collect. If that’s the case, however, we can probably expect years more of cyclists receiving tidbits from government rather than the large-scale investments that might just establish cycling as a mainstream option for short trips that its advocates (and anybody that’s visited Copenhagen, or even Berlin) believe that it can become.