Aidan,

I apologise for misspelling your name. My error.

Nevertheless, your excuses for Labor policy amount to wilful blindness.

There really is not much point in debating you.

Nevertheless:
>pink batts,
Easy to criticise with hindsight, but solar panels were expensive in those days, and improving energy efficiency was the best value thing we could do to reduce our carbon footprint.

Solar panels are still expensive and are of little use without storage, requiring highly flammable lithium batteries: $15,000 gets you a barely adequate system.

Carbon dioxide is 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere by volume. Human-produced carbon dioxide is 3 per cent of that. Australia produces 1.3 per cent of that 3 per cent. And electricity generation is about one third of that: 0.000002 per cent. Any reduction of our "carbon footprint" is just another meaningless gesture by posturing leftists. At vast expense, of course.

>NDIS?
Greatly improving the standard of living of disabled people and enabling them to be more productive. Money well spent!

Please let us all know how you measure and validate "greatly improving" and in what ways they become "more productive". All of them? To what extent?

>And why haven't you dealt with the idiocy of similar disastrous grand gestures from the Left - NBN...

The NBN was entirely Stephen Conroy's baby. I don't argue that the changes introduced by Turnbull were of any value. The whole project should have been scrapped and left to private enterprise, as it has been in other countries.

>...if you want public money to be spent efficiently you need capable government; minimal government only brings false economies.

I want public money to be spent efficiently. Trouble is, you leave public spending to public service clerks with no conception of commercial reality and you end up with disaster after disaster, as in each of these examples and many others, including the BER.

Your commitment to public service clerks is touching, but unrealistic.

Aidan,

You prove my point - and Hasbeen's, too. If the trains are not "high capacity" they don't turn a profit or the fares become prohibitively expensive. Which means they will be the grossly expensive white elephant some of us predict. Just like Labor's other hare-brained projects.

First question: how many people in, say, Parkes, need to travel to Sydney or Melbourne on a regular basis? Very few, I'd suggest. Indeed, the entire population along the proposed route - ignoring Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - is unlikely to produce a viable passenger base.

So what is your solution: will the trains run with a couple of carriages? Or are a small number of larger trains going to skip stations? They're both your ideas and seem to be mutually contradictory.

The Sydney to Melbourne air route, faster and cheaper than HSR, is - wait for it - Sydney to Melbourne. Doesn't much help those on the ground in between, so there is no equivalency with HSR and leaves country residents with no genuine alternatives.

The total population of smaller towns and cities along the route is likely to be insufficient to turn a profit for HSR. "Profit" - you know, return on investment and some spare cash to pay off the trillions construction and land purchase would cost. And the more frequently the HSR stops, the less "HS" it becomes, leaving passengers with less time for whatever reason they are travelling to or from the metro centres.

One of life's mysteries is why the Left are so attracted to grand gestures, but haven't figured out how to calculate commercial viability. To the Left, profit is a dirty word. That leads them to the only other option: force taxpayers to squander trillions of dollars via subsidies or handouts.

Sorry that I missed responding to your earlier question about schools computers. This is what I had in mind: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/335554/rudd_defends_one_pc_per_student_policy/

calwest,
Solar panels are much cheaper than they were a decade ago, and the grid means home storage isn't needed. Eventually solar panels will be so ubiquitous, and batteries so cheap, that home storage will become commonplace, but at the moment our use of renewables is so low that we hardly need storage at all.

>Carbon dioxide is 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere by volume.
Currently 0.041%. Its preindustrial concentration was 0.028%, and it's fair to attribute 100% of this 46% rise to humans because over this time nature has been a net absorber of CO2, so your 3% figure is at best misleading.

>Australia produces 1.3 per cent of that
But Australia's inaction has been used by over countries to justify their own inaction, so doing something about it is far from a "meaningless gesture".

Obviously we should minimise the expense of our carbon footprint reduction. That means concentrating on what's easiest and cheapest with current technology. Now that's electricity generation, but ten years ago it was efficiency improvements.

As for the NDIS, do your own research! I am not involved, so if you want to know how it's going and how statistics are collected, it's best to ask those who are. What I do know is that it's designed to address a very serious problem that has gone unfixed for far too long.

With the NBN, I accept that scrapping it and leaving it all to private enterprise would've been better than Turnbull's NBN. But had the NBN been done properly, the result would have been better still.

(tbc)

calwest (continued)
>Trouble is, you leave public spending to public service clerks with no conception of commercial reality and
>you end up with disaster after disaster, as in each of these examples and many others, including the BER.

Firstly, I'm not suggesting putting public service CLERKS in charge of the spending; I'm suggesting putting public service ENGINEERS in charge.
Secondly, an understanding of commercial reality should be part of the job. But do you have any actual evidence that the public service don't understand commercial reality?
Thirdly, considering that the BER was only a disaster in the two states where its implementation was outsourced to the private sector, your argument is illogical.

calwest,
The railway would compete with aviation for Sydney to Melbourne traffic in two ways: on price and on convenience. Melbourne Airport is a long way from the CBD, its bus connections are limited and parking is very expensive. Some people would find it more convenient to fly, but most would not.

As for what trains would be used, I'd expect there to be three kinds:
• High capacity trains (probably based on a French design) for nonstop Sydney to Melbourne services
• Lightweight, lower capacity trains (probably based on a Japanese design) for services making intermediate stops
• A few trains based on a Spanish design for services to rural NSW utilising upgraded existing lines for part of the way

People who need to visit Sydney and Melbourne on a regular basis are unlikely to choose to live in country towns at the moment. That's something that HSR will change.

The idiotic notion that "To the Left, profit is a dirty word" clearly came from someone on the right who was too lazy to understand the Left's real objectives. There's certainly nothing inherently wrong with making a profit - indeed it's essential for business. But the public benefit more when the gains are passed on to customers instead. And very high profits may be an indication of market failure.

High speed rail is a long term investment. It may take years to turn a profit, though ultimately it will turn a very large profit. But there's a lot more to economic benefits than profits. The main benefits to the nation are not the profit it makes, but the productivity gain it enables others to make.