I like the idea if intercapital high speed rail. But why a passenger service? Surely Australia should be looking to high speed freight services. It would reduce the number of trucks on our highways thus reducing emmissions. Containerised freight would be delivered to, and collected from, a purpose built terminal in each major city and major country centres en route. Surely Australia is big enough and clever enough to develop such a system.

Nice start, good instincts.

An interesting point of difference is "democracy"! Rome, Paris and London have had popular uprisings from the pre-Cicero times and pretty much always - see George Rude's "The Mob in History". Aussies are horrified by agrarian and youth uprisings but therein lies a wonderful effect of the disinfecting power of sunlight, perhaps. This leads to caution about copying Britain's "localism", not because it's wrong - we need it as much as they do - but they've done it so badly.

I would actually agree that Australians are probably one of the whiniest people in the world- and much more so than people we THINK we are better than.

Having said that, for carbon pricing, considering how eager governments are to push these; yet at the same time, how willing they are to use our taxes to compensate the actual polluters, and worse, how unwilling they are to hook Australia up to more alternate energy markets (the whole (supposed) point of carbon taxing is that there are alternative products we are supposed to actually convert TO); I can understand the complaints.

It is visibly a scam to get more taxes out out of us. They don't actually want us to NOT use these products (because chances are many of these politicians have shares in these industries)- they simply want us to pay more for it but have no choice but to keep using it.

Well thanks for that David.

I had no idea there were public servants with such good sense.

I can't imagine your popular with many of your coworkers, or is it only the pollies who fall for all the stupidity we now get

I have lost track of all the proposals for high speed train services in Australia and the author is right in that they are of only marginal interest in Aus.. as for freight services mostly the proposals have involved improving existing lines which were laid down in the steam age.. a brand new high speed freight line would be nice but there is simply not the business to justify a new line anywhere.. although I think there is a proposal floating around for one connecting Melbourne to Brissie..

The only new, major line I can think of is the Adelaide to Darwin line which turned out to be a commercial failure, despite the popularity of The Ghan passegner service to Darwin.

adopting good ideas that work in other countries is a great idea. Look at the crime rates in Singapore and you will get the drift. Adopting United Nations propaganda is the thing that gets up the nose of many Aussies. We have seen what their propaganda has done to Britian, France and the rest of Europe. The leftist elite who are so full of self righteousness that they know what is best for the world. They don't mind lying (as with climate change) or using any other methods to try and convince the public that black is white and vice versa. They hide behind a 'human rights' dogma and pseudo science in order to penalise the hard working people so that their corrupt Governmental structures can be supported. Aussie are good at smelling hypocrisy and the polls in this nation indicate they have caught on.

Goods rail doesn't have to be fast, all you need is the infrastructure to carry the weight, which is the bit that is lacking. HSR and goods rail can not be two of the same.

@ HasBeen,

It's worth noting that the duty of the public service is to implement the will of elective respresentatives of the people (aka Government), whatever our personal opinion on specific policy matters might be.

So dont be too hard on us!

Cheers,
Dave

David, it seems to me the classic example of a bad idea for seemingly good reasons is the Feminist makever of this and other Western nations. It has been of great benefit to large Corporates seeking to increase their turnover, since it has created "money for nothing" in that work that used to be done as a general good - household services, childcare, care of aged or infirm relatives - to be turned into an economic activity that has to be directly paid for, and requires businesses to provide.

It has lead to the decline of the family unit, to the point that now the most common environment for children to experience is that of the "single-mother" household. Moreover, few women have any choice any more about whether they work or not. As a result, there has to be enormous expenditure of public money to pay for them to take time off to fulfil their "mere" biological needs.

On top of that, when they decide they want to have children, they're finding it increasingly difficult to find men willing to inseminate them.

Even more worryingly, this is peacetime, not a time of crisis caused by war. During the last major war we relied on the unmobilised female workforce to "keep the home fires burning" by doing work that men would normally do. What do we do when our women are all working already? Where's the buffer? Unbuffered systems fail catastrophically.

The folly of the NBN and the carbon tax are tiny by comparison