Steve Price: Australia is sleepwalking towards third world status
Fast rail has been promised by all sides of politics for years only to crumble into a heap of expensive broken dreams and as we close out 2024, we’re about to witness more hollow promises.
Opinion
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Australia needs to wake up.
A great country is sleepwalking towards third world status.
This week I travelled from Brisbane to Adelaide on the rebranded Ghan passenger train with over 200 other tourists.
Operating as the Great Southern – and before any critics have a crack, I paid full fare, it was a 90th birthday gift for my mother – we left Brisbane on Monday and got to Adelaide on Thursday, including a quick stopover in Melbourne. The train was 30 carriages long and took three days and three nights to travel 1639km.
Compare that trek to China’s Shanghai Maglev travelling at speeds of 460km/h, or Japan’s Shinkansen, flying along at 320 km/h. Admittedly we were in no hurry this week but you get my point. Those Asian nations are light years ahead of us and frustratingly no one here seems to care much.
At around 5am on Wednesday, just south of Junee and north of Wagga Wagga, the train was rocking around so much I thought we might run off the rails. Ironically, Junee was the hometown of former Nationals leader Tim Fischer, a fierce advocate for fast rail in Australia. Tim died in 2019 and never saw his dream of a fast train to fruition.
I’m predicting it will never happen.
Australia and Australian politics are full of broken promises and unfulfilled dreams. During the last federal election in 2022 Labor actually made a promise to build a fast train along the east coast connecting Sydney to Melbourne.
In January this year they made a major step – not laying a single kilometre of track or releasing a preferred route – and appointed a public servant to an organisation grandly labelled the High-Speed Rail Authority. Tim Parker was made CEO and, miracle of miracles, he inherited a business case for the Sydney to Newcastle stretch of rail — heading away from Melbourne not towards us at all!
What a joke!
My whole life this fast rail fantasy has been promised by all sides of politics only to crumble into a heap of expensive broken dreams and in a sense is a living example of how our country cheats itself out of the shining example of what we should become. As I struggled to stop falling out of the top bunk in cabin seven of rail car L it was depressing to think what incompetent politicians haven’t done for Australia.
As we close out 2024, we are about to witness yet again another bunch of hollow promises.
Sure, nuclear power sounds like a good idea and I support it but highly doubt uranium will be powering my lights before my own go out.
Like the mythical fast train, it sounds like an idea of its time but when reality hits the road, I’m sceptical anyone will be in power long enough to pull it off.
As we head into 2025, and as Australians prepare to take their Christmas break, Labor this week slid out a bunch of numbers that should scare all of us.
Since the 2022 election 26,000 businesses have been declared insolvent including a record (shameful) number in November this year.
ASIC numbers show that a record 12,405 firms were declared insolvent between January and November this year alone. This included 7000 in construction, 4000 hospitality businesses and over 1700 retailers. Australians are hurting but as usual governments just keep spending, with the Albanese government adding an extra 26,000 public servants since coming to power.
Real businesses are bleeding and Albanese and his cronies think it’s acceptable to bloat the public service by forcing us taxpayers to stump up wages for another 26,000. To do what exactly?
On the numbers this week, it gets worse – if that’s possible. This week’s Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO) is a complete horror show. We are talking billions and trillions with budget deficit blowouts, increased taxes and a $379 billion budget windfall all spent. Labor is blowing our financial future and pretending it’s not happening.
Depressingly that means even if someone in Canberra had a vision for a nation-building bright idea, like fast rail, we couldn’t afford it anyway. Instead, we are charging down the renewable’s road, carpet bombing regional Australia with millions of hectares of solar panels, wind turbines and shoving transmission lines through farms, native forests and national parks.
That slow train I was on this week slid past a massive solar panel installation south of Wangaratta that you only glimpse from the road, but it hits you in the face from the train tracks.
I can’t nominate one inspirational idea that’s come out of Canberra in my lifetime. Labor will trot out social reforms like Medicare and the NDIS and, in the past, free university education but where are the nation building infrastructure projects to get excited about. Embarrassingly you have to go all the way back to the Snowy River Scheme of the 1950s.
The PM has tried to use that cute old political trick of putting a label on a bunch of words hoping we will all fall for it. It’s called his Future Made in Australia plan, and he hopes no-one takes a long hard look at it because it’s really all about funding for renewable energy projects.
What it is not, is a plan for us to again make things like cars, washing machines, fridges or heaven forbid TV’s or computers. It is certainly not about that promised fast rail link up and down the east coast.
You will however in a few years be able to go from Cheltenham to Box Hill on Dan and Jacinta’s Suburban Rail Loop – just don’t try getting to the airport.
Happy New Year everyone.
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