Qlddecides team member Jason Wilson casts an eye over Labor's new attack ads on Campbell Newman in Brisbane, and the transport issues that have come to dominate local politics here.

It's no surprise that transport is emerging as the key policy battleground in Brisbane during this local election campaign. The city has grown at an unprecedented speed in the last decade, and the strain on transport corridors and infrastructure has been obvious for some time.

Campbell Newman ran hard on Brisbane's transport woes in 2004, promising tunnels and road improvement to unblock Brisbane's arteries. This was in contrast to the Soorley administration's focus on public transport, and was laser-targeted at  commuters' growing frustration with the twice-daily ordeal of making their way home to the suburbs along roads like the Ipswich Motorway and Kelvin Grove Road.
 

Although public transport initiatives like the South-East busway and the now-iconic Citycats were popular, it's arguable that their benefits took too long to trickle through to the outer suburbs, and that most of the benefits were felt by inner-city residents in safe wards. Car-reliant voters in the outer suburbs didn't see West End-based Tim Quinn as offering them what they needed. His lack of charisma and party hack image didn't help.

Newman - an engineer - brought a grand vision to the table. Five tunnels - including an under-river tunnel now under construction - would take pressure off the bottlenecks and get traffic moving. Voters bought this to the extent of making him Lord Mayor, but he's faced a hostile council throughout his first term.

What the ALP are relying on in their new attack ads on Newman is some voters suddenly realising they've gotten more than they bargained for. The first under-river tunnel is due for completion in 2010. Meanwhile, it's  causing inevitable disruption to traffic where the works are being done - in Herston/Bowen Hills on the Northside and Woolloongabba on the Southside.

The bigger issue in the long run might be cost. The cost of the under-river tunnel has blown out to $3 billion, and the toll looks like coming in at $4.50 each way. The overall costs and projections of his transport infrastructure has brought warnings from international credit ratings agency, Standard and Poors. Labor's general in council, David Hinchcliffe, is warning that the city will be sent broke, and that important programmes are being sacrificed for Newman's grand strategy. The ads play up Newman's occasional stumbles over snowballing costs.

Labor ought to be able to make hay with this, especially at a time when major metropoles like London and New York are doing all they can to discourage traffic from coming in to the city, and trying to force people on to public transport.

But among all the attack ads, it's difficult to discern what their competing vision is. Will they complete the projects that are already underway? Will they return to a focus on public transport? The policies may be in there somewhere, but the carping is much more prominent.  It could also be argued that alternative Lord Mayoral candidate Greg Rowell has something of a recognition problem - lethal in local politics.

If the polling is to believed, Newman will be returned. Perhaps the attack ads are being used to draw attention to these problems as part of a two-term strategy. By bringing up Newman's spending now, they're betting that the problems and costs will have escalated by 2012, and ratepayers will have had enough. The real risk with that, of course, is that by then Newman's infrastructure might be delivering.