Wild retained a sense of bitterness about the federal government's short-sightedness that thwarted the project. He said: The thing that lost the project in the end was that we were asking for some very reasonable taxation arrangements which would apply in the early days of very heavy spending – in the long run we would be paying more taxes but we just wanted to ease the taxes during that early time – and that was knocked back by the government, in fact by the treasurer ... Paul Keating, and I would say that he is the man responsible for stopping project."