A refreshingly frank article written by an author with a brain!

Yes Alan, and refreshing common sense!
Let me add my four cents worth.
The NBN will allow more to work from home, albeit, deprive demonstrably dumb employers of their ideas!
And sure to be resisted by those with none of their own!
Decentralization, and new centres replete with their own CBD's and industrial estates, will work!
But then you need city centric town planners with that very brief, rather than seemingly explicit instructions to maximize developers returns, along with those of the authorizing authorities?
Finally, we need rapid rail, which will allow longer but quicker commutes, and with little if any productive down time!
Rhrosty.

Well you started out alright Alan, but then you went right off the rails.

Yes of course people on the fringes need a car or 2.

Yes of course public transport is utterly useless for a huge number of people, particularly those with none at all.

Then you went wrong. Studies have shown that public transport in all but close inner city areas use more fuel/power, [thus emissions], per passenger mile than private cars, & they also cost more.

Public transport of any type cost huge subsidies from taxpayers to run at all. If you want equity public transport must become user pays, & not be subsidised by those low paid outer suburb folk, who have none. We really do have to start to sit on those academic town planners, who, after their required trip to Copenhagen, want to have all Ozzies cycle everywhere. Public transport subsidies are after all, just welfare for well off inner city trendies.

But then your worst mistake. You want to add yet another level of welfare payment to the already bloated mix. As if we don't have enough welfare payments ripping off the rest, including the subsidies for public transport.

It is time to amalgamate all welfare to just one payment, all up front & visible to all.

With all the semi hidden welfare, [with public housing, rent assistance, health, education, transport, tax A & B, child care, school bonuses, the list goes on], those in the know, who organise themselves to take advantage are coining it, while still crying poor me, & ripping off others.

Adding yet another payment available to the few is just the wrong way to go, leading to yet more entitlement feeling. Perhaps if all this was stopped those in the outer ring might pay less tax, & be able to get along on their earnings.

So while your understanding of the problem is spot on, your solution would just benefit a few while disadvantaging many more.

No one especially the academic, has acknowledged the elephant.
The CSIRO estimates a high value of $8 a litre by end of this decade.
Our oil production has fallen to a bit under 400,000 barrels a day.
We use over 1 million barrels a day and the last of our oil refineries
are to be closed in the next two years.
The NRMA report warns of the risk to our oil supplies.

The US production of tight oil is calculated to start its decline
before the end of the decade which will show the conventional oil
production level declining.

In this environment an academic recommends subsidising car travel !

Surely in his research he could not have missed such important data ?