[Peetwo]

Update II: Wagners - $5bn Badgerys? They’re dreamin’

Via the Oz... :

Badgerys offer puts Wagners in the frame

John Wagner with wife Liz at his Wellcamp airport.

• The Australian
  
  
• 12:00AM May 13, 2017
  
  
  
• JAMIE WALKER
  
  Associate Editor
  Brisbane
  @Jamie_WalkerOz
  [img=0x0]https://i1.wp.com/pixel.tcog.cp1.news.com.au/track/component/author/26017200f01dc40ee199934121ddd2ec/?esi=true&t_product=the-australian&t_template=s3/austemp-article_common/vertical/author/widget&td_bio=false[/img]
  

John Wagner’s phone was running hot this week with calls from the very people who wouldn’t give his airport the time of day not so long ago.

“Satisfying,” is how he des­cribes their interest now.

Wagner and his millionaire brothers used their own land and money to do what hadn’t been done in Australia for nearly 50 years: they built an international airport outside their home town of Toowoomba and got it to fly as a business.

Having answered the critics of their Wellcamp venture, the rich-listed Wagners want to give wings to the perennial white jumbo of Australian aviation, a second Sydney airport.

Their hat is in the ring to design, construct and potentially operate the $5-billion-plus gateway at Badgerys Creek, 50km west of the Sydney CBD — and they profess to have the know-how to get the job done sooner and more cheaply than anyone else.

Their DIY model for infrastructure development shows that game-changing projects in Australia don’t need decades to be built or to land with cost overruns. The government has set an opening date of 2026 for the Western Sydney Airport; Wagner says he could get the “job of work” done in three years flat.

The cost to taxpayers is estimated to start at $5.3bn; Wagner insists the family firm could bring it in for “well south” of that, depending on what is specified when the government puts the project to market. Based on the publicly available information, his price has a floor of $3.5bn.

“It’s a big site and it’s a job of work to do, but our view is if we did what we did at Wellcamp, then you can cut an enormous amount of time and cost out of it,” he told The Weekend Australian.

“We … would be more than comfortable building it ourselves. It doesn’t frighten me at all.”

As senior director in the family business, Wagner, 56, drove development of the $200 million Brisbane West Wellcamp Airport, a gleam of white, modular buildings and tarmac clustered around a 2.87km runway. From the time the first sod was turned, it took just 19 months and 11 days to complete, opening in November 2014.

This is the proof Wagner cites that he can deliver what he promises for Badgerys Creek. True, the western Sydney airport will be a vastly greater undertaking. Stage 1 of the project would handle up to 10 million passengers a year, eight times the number Wellcamp can accommodate. A government plan released in December envisages 80 per cent of the traffic through Badgerys Creek would be domestic, with each domestic gate averaging 5.5 aircraft turns daily.

The integrated passenger terminal would be up to 90,000sq m, with room for international ser­vices. By way of comparison, the T3 domestic terminal at Sydney Airport managed by Qantas is 78,000sq m. Yet, like Wellcamp, the new airport will be configured around a single runway, though longer at 3.7km. “My view with this project is that everything inside the fence is pretty straight forward,” Wagner said, detailing his vision for Badgerys Creek.

As he points out, his company has the hands-on experience to build a full-scale civil airport from scratch in this country. Wellcamp was the first to come on line since Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport opened in 1970.

Initially, his plan to fly passengers and international freight out of range-top Toowoomba, 120km west of Brisbane, was seen as a rich man’s folly. Wagner’s overtures to the “big guys” in the aviation and construction sectors fell on deaf ears.

“There was a lot of scepticism from the major consultants … who didn’t really believe that a new airport was going to be built,” he remembered. “We were quite disappointed in the lack of interest. But in hindsight, they did us a favour. We got in a team who were nimble and relatively inexpensive compared to the big guys and built the thing ourselves.”

Much of the work that he had planned to contract out was brought in-house to the family business, which had spun out of a concreting operation set up by his stonemason father, Henry Wagner. Today, the Wagner Group operates quarries and prefabricates bridge spans from bespoke composites; it has built an oil pipeline in Russia and one of the world’s biggest nickel refineries in New Caledonia. In 2015, the Wagners ranked 14th on the BRW families rich list, with an estimated worth of $955m.

With full control of the Wellcamp build, Wagner and his brother, Denis, were able to run it their way — with their own crews and equipment, using cement mixed in a company plant and soil and rock fill hauled from on-site quarries. They didn’t wait for the detailed specs. Once the masterplan was completed by Canberra architects Guida Moseley Brown — responsible for the redesign of the national capital’s airport — they put the pedal down.

“We were able to start the earthworks and construction while the detailed planning packages were being finalised. That saved us six to eight months,” Wagner said.

He would like to replicate this “design and construct” model at Badgerys Creek. “It’s a much more flexible and efficient approach,” he explained. “At Wellcamp, we appointed a builder (for the terminal) on our terms. The architects were still working on the detailed drawings as the foundations were filled. If you have to document every finish, every light and every bit of glass before you start, it’s a huge and expensive task. We were able to manage things as we went along.”

Work went on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Pavement engineer Phillip Bell, of Gold Coast-based aviation consultants ACG, saved time and money by using roadwork equipment to concrete the runway. “Airports have got such a high focus on safety that it is very hard to unlock innovation,” he said. “John and Denis were brave enough to use a concrete paving machine and we … achieved massive amounts of efficiency from that.”

The Wagner opted to spend money upfront by over-engineering the runway to save down the track on maintenance. The heavier layering — underpinned by a rock base up to 8m deep — meant that the airstrip would better withstand the thud of a 300-tonne Boeing 747 touching down, adding years of service life. He believes these techniques would pay off big-time at Badgerys Creek.

The longer runway doesn’t phase him in the slightest, though he stresses that no one has yet seen the crucial geotechnical data. “Basically, that’s just more gravel, concrete and lights,” he said.

Both Malcolm Turnbull and Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher have visited Wellcamp, and Wagner hopes they keep in mind what they learned as the government frames tender terms for the new airport.

Asked if his company was certain to bid, he said: “Absolutely.”
And this time around, he’s the one being chased by contractors keen to climb on board.

“My view is, the quicker you build it, the quicker you get a return,” he said. “Sydney Airport is currently quite constrained. It has a curfew and slot times are hard to get. We need a second airport in five years, not 10 years.”

Brendan Lyon of think tank Infrastructure Partnerships Australia said the design-and-construct procurement model advocated by the Wagners was routinely used to bring on public assets such as water plants and motorways.

A fan of what they did at Wellcamp, Lyon welcomes their interest in Badgerys Creek “given the 30 or 40 years thrashing around” the new airport. “In Sydney, we are building motorways that were planned in 1951, rail links outlined in the 1920s … I think people have sat up and taken notice of the Wagners because they decided they could see a commercial opportunity, they backed themselves, built the airport and it appears to have worked on a commercial basis,” Lyon said.

John Wagner’s thinking goes to how airports should be run, as well as constructed. Staff at Wellcamp are expected to be competent in three roles. Security personnel handle baggage or wait tables, while back-office people might front a ticketing booth or check-in. “You can run the place typically with less people, more efficiently, and the staff are over the moon because they get to do different things rather than the same job all the time,” he said.

Replicating those arrangements would be problematic. The Wellcamp workforce is small and non-unionised, but Wagner insisted he would be open to union participation in the western Sydney project.

In developing Wellcamp airport, Wagner said his family viewed it as an “intergenerational asset” with a horizon of decades, not the next annual result. Qantas and regional carriers Airnorth and Regional Express operate scheduled flights to Sydney, Melbourne, Townsville and Cairns while Cathay Pacific Airways has looped Wellcamp into a weekly Boeing 747 freight run to Hong Kong.

He believes the true “game changer” lies with the inland rail, the new freight corridor between Brisbane and Melbourne via Toowoomba, Moree, Parkes and Albury that received $8.4bn in Tuesday’s budget, along with funding for Badgerys Creek. Wagner has offered to invest $60m in a multinodal air, rail and road freight interchange if the indicative route of the railway is shifted 15km east to run past Wellcamp.

Fletcher said the Wagners and “any other interested construction companies” would be welcome to enter an open and competitive tender process for western Sydney airport.

MTF...P2