The high speed rail approvals process models both tracks in full. The result is not what this project expected, and it is published because it is not.

Critical path: 2,700 days. Serial total: 3,190 days. Addressable waits (scheduling plus queue): zero. The entire Commonwealth track -- documentation, public comment, recommendation report, approval -- sits off the critical path, because the NSW track is longer and the two run concurrently.

So the honest headline is: the federal duplication on this project probably costs very little elapsed time. This site publishes that even though it cuts against the reform, because a database that only produces findings its authors wanted is not a database.

The case for merging is therefore not a schedule case. It rests on three things the critical path cannot see:

1. Cost. Two assessments of a 194 km corridor is a substantial duplicated consultancy spend on a project already costed at $61.2 billion for its first two stages, funded by the same taxpayer twice.
2. Consultation burden on communities. Two public comment periods, on two documents, about the same railway, addressed to the same residents along the same corridor. Consultation fatigue is a real cost and it falls on exactly the people consultation is supposed to serve. The second round is unlikely to surface much the first did not.
3. Fragility. A parallel track only stays free if it stays parallel. The Commonwealth clock stops whenever further information is requested, and the department's timeliness has ranged from 19 to 87 per cent of statutory timeframes on the ANAO record. The moment the Commonwealth track slips past the state track it becomes the critical path, and nobody will have planned for it. Concurrency that depends on one queue never getting longer than another is not a design, it is a coincidence.

There is also a plain accountability point. The Commonwealth cannot credibly ask states to accept accredited single assessment while running a duplicate assessment of its own agency's project.