High-speed rail is an Australian political punchline. After 50 years, will Labor’s newest proposal finally leave the station?

What’s this, the seventh time this has been announced (not counting the announcement on Utopia of course).

This is definitely the one though, right?

Right?

In increasing order of probability:

– HSR MEL-SYD
– Melbourne Airport rail
– the Second Coming

No. ^(1)

^(1) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge’s_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines) ]

As someone who lives in Newcastle, this will ruin Newcastle. More Sydneysiders moving here means less houses, more road traffic. They should build it to Canberra first and turn places like Goulburn, Moss Vale, Bowral and Marulan into big cities.

The only time the government remembers Newcastle exists to take money from our port, and to say the words “high speed rail” every few years.

> After 50 years, will Labor’s newest proposal finally leave the station?

Betteridge’s Law Of Headlines says no

I’m making my prediction: a liberal government will be elected after running a campaign on how the project will ‘bury the country in debt’, they’ll revise the project mid-way through and replace materials with a cheaper, inferior, out-of-date alternative, it will blow out years past the original expected delivery date and cost exponentially more than the original plan, and once again Australians will be left with an inferior product that doesn’t achieve what it was supposed to.

Just tax the mining companies, billionaires, and tech giant properly and get the fuck on with it

I feel like the same people who are complaining about cities being overcrowded and property prices being too high are the same ones complaining about the innovation that will allow people to live in the regions and commute to said cities.

It’s a reasonable, common sense good idea.

Which is precisely why it won’t ever happen here.

lol. No.

To be honest the thing that stops high-speed rail competing is that we don’t tax jet fuel or emissions. If we had environmental taxes people would take the train more.

I’ve had a pretty deep look at this current round and talked to transport experts about high-speed rail in Australia. Part of the problem was that over a lot of those 50 years, cost-benefit analysis for public transport consistently under-counted the value to the community of public transport. This is partly why the only new line built in Sydney in that time was the Airport extension, because the benefit was clear, and the cost (deep embarrassment during the Olympics when tourists turned up and had to take a bus) was also very clear. The other big part is that the focus, historically, has been on connecting Sydney to Melbourne, which continues to be extremely expensive for a benefit that’s very difficult to calculate.

Of course, the reason why they’re doing Sydney to Newcastle is two-fold. First, it’s shorter than Sydney to Canberra. The terrain is diabolical, but the terrain is diabolical out of Sydney regardless. Second, high-speed rail in Europe is city-to-city, and Australia only has one important major city in each state. We’re in the middle of a slowly building housing crisis that can’t be fully resolved by trying to cram more people into Sydney and Melbourne, but people, quite rightly, want to live in cities. The solution here is to use the high-speed rail to *build* new cities; send a million+ people to the Central Coast and Newcastle each, letting them still have easy *access* to Sydney without needing to live there. If this works, you could build out lines to other regional centres and turn them into proper cities in their own right, like building a high-speed line from Melbourne out to Albury.

The trick here is that, if you build a junction near Lake George, north of Canberra (because you don’t want to go *through* Canberra for cost and speed reasons), a high-speed line from Albury to that junction costs a lot less than Melbourne to Sydney, and you’ll already have a higher benefit because you’ve bulked up cities along the high-speed rail corridors. This makes the Melbourne-Sydney rail link much more feasible, and you’ll at least have a benefit from the regional centres connected directly to their cities. It’ll still be a fair bit slower than a flight, but I’ve seen proposed routes with modern tilt trains that could do it in 3 or so hours, Southern Cross to Sydney Central, and that makes it attractive to business commuters who’d be able to work during the trip and absolutely feel the transfer time and dead time in the airport.

Now with all that said, one would be foolish to say that high-speed rail in Australia is actually happening. But this is the closest we’ve come to an actual plan, and it does answer a big political question: what is the point of an Albanese government? Actually building high-speed rail answers that question, and given the Coalition is collapsing and One Nation would have to win teal seats to govern, there’s a chance they could actually *start* building before a right-wing government takes power. Politicians rarely interfere with infrastructure projects that are half-built.

Can’t wait for it to get the nbn transformation if lab lose power, just imagine.

To be fair, it’s not perfect, but Labor is achieving some serious shit!

Now get serious on climate and we could be getting somewhere!