;) ;) ;) ;)

doesn't mean i think it's the government's job to deliver it.....Foxtel is a good example, their rollout of paytv was extraordinary.

UK Model Flawed In Australian Environment

Over the past few years much has been said about the UK’s BDUK project that seeks to deploy FTTC (Fibre to the Cabinet – essentially FTTN) to a majority of the UK. While on paper the UK seems comparable to the Australian situation when it comes to telecommunications, there is little in the way of similarities other than both countries having a large incumbent ex-government telco that drives the market.

While much of the argument against FTTN in Australia has centred around the diameter of the copper wire, there is more to it than that.

The UK situation is centred around avoiding costly trenching to supply fibre to premises, and while it does save money in the short term, deploying FTTC is becoming a nightmare for consumers. This aside, the rationale, from a business perspective, can be seen as somewhat sensible: a majority of UK lead-ins (the wires from the street into the premises) are direct buried.

Direct buried cables are a nightmare. Not only do they not allow for any upgrading of lead-ins without trenching, they are impossible to fix, highly susceptible to any form of subsidence, and other environmental damage. While installing conduit doesn’t mitigate these risks completely, it does offer more of a buffer, allowing easier upgrades and preventing much of the damage direct buried is susceptible to.

In Australia a majority of lead-ins are conduit based, meaning there is nowhere near as much need to trench for upgrades. If trenching is required due to blocked or damaged conduit, it would be required anyway with FTTN/C to repair faulty cables that are part and parcel with damaged/blocked conduit. New technologies designed to unblock conduit pipes are removing the need to trench for this obstacle, so the only reason to trench for fibre is damaged conduit.

During my time working in Telstra’s Plant Assignment/Activations area, I rarely came across direct buried lead-ins. Most, if not all, were on rural properties that would be receiving fixed wireless connections under both plans anyway.

It’s clear that using the UK as a comparison to Australia is flawed on many fronts, and looking at the direction the UK is going, FTTC is not working out so well.

With TalkTalk already tabling plans to hook 60% of the UK up to FTTP, there’s little chance BT and other providers who opted for FTTC will make their money back.

The challenges faced in Australia are fairly unique and comparing the NBN with BDUK is looking more and more like hollow rhetoric designed to confuse consumers as to what the best solution is.

Not only are NBN Co committed to buying Telstra’s copper at this stage, but they are committed to using Telstra to repair the copper they have neglected for over a decade. This is where the real costs will be seen as the network, in its current form, is completely unworkable as a FTTN network. Telstra has known this for some time, but somehow the government still committed to buying the network.

With the costs associated with buying and repairing the network being greater than the costs of leasing the pits and conduit, one has to ask where is the business case for this? The government and NBN Co were not forthcoming with the true costs associated with this outcome, only mentioning in passing that there wouldn’t be extra costs with acquiring the network. Maintenance is the real killer when it comes to telecommunications, if it wasn’t, Telstra’s network would be pristine.

This is all without mentioning the looming disaster of the HFC network which seems to be kept in the shadows, only ever being mentioned in passing.

As I have said for a long time, the government is basing their policies on the assumption that NBN Co are an incumbent telco that already owns the plant, something that is not true. The deployment should have always been viewed as a greenfields deployment as NBN Co did not have plant in the street.

While the rest of the world moves toward gigabit (1Gbps) cities, some even 10 gigabit (10Gbps), Australian politicians are still arguing over whether we need 50Mbps or 100Mbps within a decade. This is the laughable nature of our political climate, where knowledge, facts, and expertise is ignored in favour of three word slogans that bare no resemblance to reality.

We are being saddled with a solution that, even at a stretch, is a poor choice for the UK, and a disastrous choice for Australia. Whether it’s incumbency, cable diameter, environment differences, or whether trenching is required or not, there is no way you can spin your way out of the facts.
http://sortius.net.au/uk-model-flawed-in-australian-environment/

If you're talking about Foxtel cable then it's exactly why the government is doing the roll out. They cherry picked the rollout to the more profitable areas and ignored the rest. What I find breathtaking is hypocrisy of the Nationals. They were all up in arms about the original FTTN plans because it screwed the regional centres (in fact they're the ones that originally coined the term Fraudband), now they're supporting it.

Telstra wins, we all lose in NBN deal

It is hard to escape the feeling that the taxpayers have been had by Telstra, which has secured crucial incremental advantages in its new $11 billion deal to help build the National Broadband Network (NBN).

While the headline figure is the same — in 2010 dollars — as the NBN deal Telstra signed under the Labor government in 2011, this is a much better deal for Telstra, as Business Spectator’s Alan Kohler explained in this excellent piece this morning and as has been underlined by the investor reaction, which lifted the telco’s shares by 1.2% in a falling market.

For example, under the new deal the cost of remediating Telstra’s ducts and pits onto the government-owned NBN Co gets a key potential liability off the books for Telstra, and while chief executive David Thodey was coy about the numbers in an analyst briefing yesterday afternoon, he fairly crowed the result was “unquestionably better for shareholders”.

The dollar figures being bandied about are confusing because they are given in net present value terms — i.e. the value of expected future income — which is a familiar concept for many in the financial community but meaningless for many. This NBN-Telstra deal is really worth more like $100 billion, which is the total amount that will be paid to Telstra over the next 30-plus years for access to its infrastructure and, after yesterday, additional design, build and maintenance work.

That income stream will make Telstra a desirable investment for decades and is a remarkable demonstration of the power of this corporate behemoth, which has turned a fundamental threat to its former monopoly franchise into a goldmine and has got its arms around a competitor.

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has claimed the Coalition’s multi-technology-mix will save $30 billion compared with Labor’s promised fibre-to-the-premise rollout, and he says it will be delivered up to four years earlier.

We will never know how much Labor’s FTTP rollout would have cost or how long it would have taken, so it is hard to argue, but there are two costs that must be balanced against any upfront saving:

As technology commentator and futurist Mark Pesce was tweeting yesterday, we forego the higher growth that would have flowed from faster internet — he cited this Ericsson study that claimed a mere doubling of bandwidth increased GDP by 0.3% — boosting tax revenues by the way and dwarfing any short-term saving; and
The taxpayer was always intended to sell off the NBN at some point; it is a safe bet that a pure FTTP network would have more value than a mixed fibre, HFC and copper network. NBN appears increasingly dependent on Telstra, and while the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will be under pressure to make sure the two companies do not get too close, this is situation normal for Telstra, which loves nothing more than a standoff with the competition regulator. (One has to ponder whether Telstra might one day even bid for the NBN — a laughable anti-competitive outcome that would defeat the whole purpose of structurally separating its wholesale and retail arms and ending its infrastructure monopoly.)
To rub salt in yesterday’s wound, taxpayers have also been had by Optus, which has now sold the NBN a dubious-quality HFC network that it has absolutely no need for, given it overlaps almost completely with Telstra’s HFC network. There was a crazy logic to buying both HFC networks when they were to be shut down in pursuit of a greater good. It makes no sense at all to buy both networks when you can only use one. Optus is being paid to stay sweet.

There was a familiar divide yesterday between the savage reaction of technology specialists — many of whom are understandably fibre zealots and see the NBN as essential infrastructure to future-proof Australia — and the mainstream media, who see the NBN as a project like any other, with costs and benefits to be weighed responsibly. It is tricky to debate the potential benefits of something we’re not getting. But Turnbull was right when he asked Lateline’s Emma Alberici, in a terrific pre-election debate on the NBN, whether Australia was suddenly “so rich that we can blast away billions of dollars without worrying about the cost?” And if Turnbull was right then he is more right now, as the country has only gotten poorer in the intervening 15 months as the mining boom recedes ever-more rapidly and manufacturing crumbles.

So we will get what we pay for. At least yesterday’s NBN agreements are technology-neutral, so as the relative costs of installing different technologies shifts, NBN and its partners will be free to roll out the most efficient option. Hopes are emerging that fibre to the distribution point — which gets fibre right down the street, much closer to the home than FTTN, and can therefore deliver much higher speeds down the shorter lengths of copper that remain — will prove increasingly competitive. The householder will bear more of the final, unpredictable cost of getting from the street into the home, but at least they will have an upgrade path to pure FTTP. Not so the millions of homeowners who will be stuck with souped-up HFC and no upgrade path to FTTP at all — ironically, the richest third of Australian homes may end up with the inferior network.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/12/15/telstra-wins-we-all-lose-in-nbn-deal/

[size=6]Low 10-year bond rates are the deal of the century but Abbott's not at the table[/size]
January 21, 2015
Peter Martin
Economics Editor, The Age

With 10-year bond rates at an all-time low, the time is ripe to get some visionary projects off the drawing board.

Who'd say no to the deal of a lifetime? Tony Abbott would, and it's our tragedy.

The 10-year bond rate is the rate at which the government can borrow for 10 years at a fixed rate of interest. Right now it's just 2.55 per cent, an all-time low.

By way of comparison in the 1970s it exceeded 10 per cent, in the 1980s it passed 16 per cent, in the 1990s it passed 10 per cent, in the 2000s 5 per cent, and until now in this decade it has usually been above 3 per cent. It dived below 3 per cent at the end of last year and is now just 2.55 per cent, the lowest in living memory.

If Australia was to borrow, big time, for important projects that took the best part of a decade to complete, it would have no risk of ever having to fork out more than 2.55 per cent a year in interest. The record low rate would be locked in for 10 years.

Australia's inflation rate is currently 2.3 per cent. Although it will almost certainly fall in the wake of the collapse in oil prices when it is updated next week, the Reserve Bank has a mandate to keep the rate centred at about 2.5 per cent. That means that right now our government is being offered billions for next to nothing, billions for scarcely more than the expected rate of inflation.

If Abbott was the chief executive of a company with good prospects he'd grab the money and borrow as many billions as he could without impairing his credit rating.

In Australia's case that's probably an extra $100 billion. That's enough to build the long-awaited Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne high-speed rail line, or to build Labor's original national broadband network, or Sydney's $11 billion WestConnex road project plus Melbourne's $11 billion metro rail project plus Melbourne's $16 billion East West Link plus something big in each of the other states.

And it would cost next to nothing. All each of these projects would need is a positive real rate of return (which several of those listed above lack) and we would get ahead.

All we would need is confidence in the worth of our ideas.

It's rare to be offered money for nothing.

It's happening because interest rates in the rest of the world have dropped to near zero. Japan's 10-year bond rate is 0.24 per cent, Germany's is 0.40 per cent, Britain's 1.54 per cent. Even in the United States, where the economy is improving, the 10-year bond rate is just 1.81 per cent. Without the ability to earn decent returns in the nations to our north, investors are flocking here and buying our government bonds. In order to get them they are prepared to bid down the rates we have to pay them to all-time lows.

It mightn't last. In October, Reserve Bank assistant governor Guy Debelle warned of a "relatively violent" correction in bond markets. He said as soon as it looks as if interest rates will climb, the purchasers of bonds will demand much higher rates in order to cover themselves for what's likely over the next 10 years. The opportunity will vanish.

If we are prepared to grasp it, there's no shortage of projects that would set us up for decades to come. In education, in health, in the delivery to railway lines into suburbs that are at present barely accessible - in all of these areas there are projects whose benefits would exceed their costs and exceed them by more than enough to pay the minimal rate of interest being demanded.

Some are visionary. Bank of America Merrill Lynch economist Saul Eslake says if Australia was to get serious about reducing its dependence on coal it would consider paying coal producers to close, and speeding up the commercialisation of battery technologies that would allow Australians with the next wave of solar panels to live off the grid.

The risk is that bad projects would be chosen over good ones and the money wasted. Abbott himself provides reason for concern. Despite promising during the election to "require all Commonwealth-funded projects worth more than $100 million to undergo a cost-benefit analysis by Infrastructure Australia" his first budget funded scores of road projects without such approval. Some of the cost-benefit studies weren't even published, in others the figures were massaged to make them look better than they were.

The Grattan Institute's John Daley suggests setting up an independent statutory authority along the lines of the Reserve Bank to vet proposals for spending big money. Its members would be appointed by the Governor-General for terms of five to seven years, it would report directly to parliament and would publish of all of its findings, complete with the assumptions behind them. He says even cheap money should be spent well.

Could the Coalition grab the opportunity before it vanishes? There are some good signs. With help from the Greens it axed Labor's debt ceiling. Since taking office it has run up an extra $78 billion in debt. But it is unorganised, behind in the polls and a prisoner of some of the silly things it said about debt while in opposition.

We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It'll slip through our fingers.

The NBN you'll get is not the one you voted for

The last time I went to America, I landed to find that Kevin Rudd was prime minister again. This time, while I was at 30,000 feet, the Abbott government put the final nail in the coffin of Labor's National Broadband Network (NBN), trickle feeding details of its long-awaited Telstra renegotiations into the pre-Christmas news void, and revealing just how willing our government is to use bald-faced bastardry to achieve its chaotic broadband vision.

Had everyone not already seen it coming, it would have been considered a farce for any government to build its telecommunications vision based on the purchase of a private asset it had previously sold to the market. Much less the simultaneous buyout of two hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) networks that may or may not be able to deliver what has been promised.

It would be a jest to base the future of a critical industry on a still-evolving vision that despite the hype and constant assertions of superior policy has failed to connect more than a handful of actual people using the new technological model.

Yet, the biggest show of bastardry came in the edict -- by amendment to existing legislation, rather than fighting for the passage of new legislation, since it would appear the mandate-claiming Abbott government is chronically unable to pass any meaningful legislation of its own -- that potential NBN threat TPG had been given the impossible task of separating its retail and wholesale operations by January 1.

Given that Telstra has been working towards separation for most of a decade and still has three years before it's meant to finish, you'd think anyone could see that offering TPG two weeks, during silly season no less, was less of a milestone in the execution of a progressive telecommunications vision than it was a desperately conceived way to buy the government enough time to deliver its multi-technology mix (MTM) NBN free from real competition.

Start the slow clap: TPG has pulled its fibre-to-the-basement (FttB) offering from the market, the controversial 1km loophole is no more, and no self-respecting telecommunications company will bother investing in new infrastructure for years to come.

Never mind TPG's entreaties that it was better intentioned than NBN Co: Malcolm Turnbull's MTM-at-all-costs, slash-and-burn policy making has finally stopped the menace of actual competition, clearing the telecommunications market of potential rivals to NBN Co and freeing the company to do what it apparently does best: Cherry pick the richest multi-dwelling units (MDUs) around the country to ensure that Australia's most cashed-up citizens get to enjoy the benefits of FttB.

The MTM NBN now has around a year and a half to get its proverbial backside into gear before its progress will be weighed and measured by an Australian populace that is still a long way from actually getting decent broadband.

Worse still, most of that populace would have little idea that NBN Co is still so very far from actually being able to deliver the MTM. After all, trials of the much-discussed (and still-mysterious) HFC networks are not set to take place for nearly a year, and services won't begin rolling out until March 2016. As you may recall, this is just months before the Coalition had originally promised to deliver 25Mbps services to everyone.

Progress on the HFC front is slow, because even by the end of last year, NBN Co had still not actually gained any access to the HFC networks upon which the NBN's future is now based. In other words, it bought Telstra and Optus HFC networks based on nothing more than strong reassurances from both companies that the networks were actually in great shape, thank you.

Most people wouldn't even buy a car based on such flimsy promises, but the Australian public has now spent over $11 billion on three legacy networks based on little more. The lack of evidence-based policy making, and the government's seemingly desperate willingness to accept kind words and assurances rather than hard, cold evidence, remains a worrying taint over the entire MTM vision.

Fibre to the node (FttN) is still in its planning phase, with significant questions remaining about the overall quality of the Telstra network, notwithstanding the documents that Telstra must have produced during negotiations showing that everything on its copper network is shipshape.

The mind boggles at just how many ways, whether through direct sabotage, more subtle stealth, or dumb luck, Telstra can slow down the delivery of the NBN whilst extending its revenue base and building out the capabilities of the 4G networks it is sure to position as an NBN rival given the opportunity.

There has still been no disclosure by Turnbull as to what penalties Telstra will incur for failure to meet deadlines, or even what those deadlines are. And so we wait.

In the meantime, NBN Co is a long way from having the integrated operational support systems necessary to turn its hodgepodge of technologies into anything more than a hodgepodge of services.

There are massive design, permit, civil, and other processes to undertake in order to make FttN workable.

And the company will have its hands full with launching and commissioning its new Ka-band satellites this year, setting the stage for the Coalition to bring its MTM architecture into the 2016 election as the Thought Bubble That Could.

Whatever the broadband outcomes produced by the policy, the level of concessions that have been made to Telstra -- which has come out of the renegotiations in a stronger position than ever, and more flush with cash than it would have been in the past -- as well as the massive looming regulatory changes and utter uncertainty about why or whether we even need other telecommunications providers anymore, will drive many heated discussions throughout the course of this year and next.

One recurring theme is sure to be the obvious: What in the world was the government thinking in buying not one, not two, but three clapped-out legacy networks that it hopes to stitch together into something that will deliver world-class broadband?

Sure, the MTM may eventually deliver decent broadband for many, if not most, Australians. But by the time the final costs are tallied, economic penalties incurred due to service delays are factored in, and opportunity costs posed by Australia's persistently ordinary broadband added in, I doubt it will have saved much off the cost of simply pushing ahead with the former fibre-to-the-premises (FttP) plan.

All of this wasn't what we were promised in the lead-up to the 2016 election, but how could it be? Nobody goes into an election promising questionable process reviews, unending technological chaos, and bloody-minded, piecemeal regulatory change. But that's what we've been given for the first half of the Abbott government's first term. Who knows what the second half has in store?
http://www.zdnet.com/article/the-nbn-youll-get-is-not-the-one-you-voted-for/

http://www.news.com.au/travel/construction-on-billionaire-visionary-elon-musks-hyperloop-to-begin-in-california-next-year/story-e6frfq7r-1227244012466

Hyperloop 1300km/h train.

Make it happen.

[size=6]Why Can’t Australia Get a Melbourne-Sydney Bullet Train?[/size]
March 5, 2015
by David Allegretti


Melbourne and Sydney are about 900 kilometres apart. According to Google Maps it takes nine hours to travel that distance by car. This is why seven million Australians make the journey by air every year, a trip taking just under an hour and a half. And that's all fine if you live close to either of those airports — but what about the rural communities living between those two cities?

Air travel cuts down on journey times, but it does little to connect Australia's east coast. If you live north of Melbourne and south of Sydney, and you need to get to either place without driving, the obvious choice would be a train. The problem isthe trains that do connect those towns sometimes have to slow to 15 km/ph due to ageing infrastructure.This all begs the question: why are bullet trains still not a thing?

In April 2013, the Australian government released a study on running an east coast bullet train down a 1,750 kilometre land corridor that would link Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne. The A$20 million study revealed that building a fully operational rail by 2065, with stations at the Gold Coast, Casino, Grafton, Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Taree, Newcastle, Southern Highlands, Wagga Wagga, Albury Wodonga, and Shepparton, would cost A$114 billion.

At full operation, the proposed high-speed rail network would carry 84 million passengers a year with express journey times totalling less than three hours between Melbourne and Sydney, the same as between Sydney and Brisbane. When you take travel time to the airport into account — as well as check-in times, baggage handling, security, and boarding — the three hour train journey from Melbourne to Sydney looks pretty appealing. But despite this, the results of the study have been left to stagnate, much like the proposed land corridor identified by the then Federal Labor government.

To get an idea of why this is, VICE spoke to Tim Bohm from Bullet Train for Australia — a political party with one policy. According to Tim the whole reason Australia is yet to see a bullet train is lobbying by the airlines. "Qantas makes two thirds of its money from its domestic routes," he explains. "And Qantas is at the big end of town — all the ministers and the lobby groups are all making sure it doesn't happen. To get a bullet train we need every level of government, from council through to state, through to federal."

Qantas CEO Alan Joyce has dismissed high-speed rail in the past, arguing that a second airport in Sydney — such as the proposed airport at Wynton, 80 kilometres southwest of the city — is the only way to meet growing demand between Melbourne and Sydney. Indeed, when you consider that the Melbourne-Sydney route is in the top five busiest airline routes in the world, and has been for the past 15 years, you can see why a high-speed rail is so unappealing to the national carriers.

The toss up between extra airports or new trains is not a new one. Since the 1990s a high-speed rail line linking Sydney to Canberra has been bandied around as a way of allowing Sydney's commuters to use Canberra's airport. This of course didn't eventuate, although a Wynton airport would also need a high-speed train, which would likely surpass the estimated 57-minute trip on the proposed Canberra line.

However the real reason Australian high-speed rail has never got up isn't so much resistance by the major political parties, but rather an unwillingness to sign off on the project's startling price tag. $114 billion is not the kind of money you find under your couch. On the other hand, Japan's national GDP actually grew in sync with bullet train profits since the inception of the revolutionary Shinkansen. When JR Central opened a new bullet train station in the Shinagawa district of southern Tokyo in 2003, huge increases in development occurred near Shinagawa station with property prices growing at 1.5 times the rate of Tokyo prices overall.

Maurice Newman, chairman of Prime Minister Tony Abbott's Business Advisory Council, has previously said that the same growth would happen for rural regions along the proposed high speed rail corridor, and rural areas such as Shepparton in Victoria or Goulburn in NSW would especially benefit. As he announced during a visit to Japan in October last year, "these places would suddenly acquire a life of their own and take some of the pressure off [airports in] major urban centres."

To see whether this evangelical perception of trains is shared by the aviation industry, I spoke to independent aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas. He concedes that while a high speed rail network "would alleviate the pressure on airports," the overall price tag would be probative. "The cost to build a train like that would be horrendous," he said. "It just doesn't make economic sense to build a train that costs over 100 billion dollars."

As it stands Treasurer Joe Hockey seems reluctant to even comment on the project, but others might be stirring. As mentioned, the 50th aniversary of the Shinkansen last October inspired interest from a number of players including former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, who argued "build it and they will use it." And if that's not good enough for Australia's airlines, they could possibly follow Lufthansa's lead. In 2011 they discontinued domestic flights between Cologne and Frankfurt and instead leased a carriage on the fast train between the two cities. If you can't beat them, join 'em.

[size=6]Canberra-Sydney very fast train key to regional development[/size]
March 6, 2015 - 11:45PM
Peter Hendy


The time has come to accelerate the cause of the Very Fast Train (VFT) proposal.

In my maiden speech to Parliament I talked about the need for rural and regional Australia to get a "fair go". I talked of the importance of re-establishing a Country-City Compact that previously recognised the importance to urban Australians of the development of regional areas for the future prosperity of the nation as a whole.

I am strongly behind the VFT project because of its major implications for developing regional Australia. As a federal member of parliament representing the south east corner of NSW – which encompasses much of the "Capital Region" – I have a personal interest in this because every major proposal put forward over the last three decades has nominated the Sydney-Canberra corridor as the first stage of any such project.

The Federal Government has rightly nominated infrastructure spending as a key to productivity growth for the nation. It is a central plank of our economic strategy for building our nation in the 21st century.

The Government has already committed $300 million to finalise the plans, engineering design and environmental approvals for the Inland Rail project between Brisbane and Melbourne. This is a freight rail project that when completed will substantially reduce the travel times (up to 25%) between those two cities and by-pass the congestion on Sydney freight lines. The construction itself will take many years and an estimated capital cost of $4.7 billion. It is a real nation-building project. Equally, however, greater attention should be given to the VFT.

Indeed it is disappointing that the Government announced in 2013 that it was abolishing the High Speed Rail Advisory Group. Happily, however, in contrast the Government subsequently announced that it is continuing to work with the NSW, Victoria, Queensland and ACT governments to protect the identified rail corridors to ensure that if and when the VFT proceeds it can do so in the least cost way.

Such a long term project will lead to development in our region that kills once-and-for-all Canberra's unhealthy dependency on the federal public service and concerns about being a "one company town". It will also help with wider regional development. Just making an economically stronger Canberra will help the region. But further, if a terminus came into Canberra airport it would be even more significant. The linkages with Moruya and Merimbula airports, and hopefully a revived Snowy Mountains airport (south of Cooma) could lead to huge economic spin-offs. Commuting from Goulburn to Sydney would become viable.

A detailed study for the Government released in April 2013 by AECOM consultants costed the VFT at $114 billion for 1,748 kms of track that would take until 2065 to build. That would cover a route from Melbourne, via Canberra and Sydney to Brisbane (with 12 stops in regional Australia). Other researchers have estimated that it would cost between $63 and $84 billion and be built as early as 2025. The Sydney-Canberra link according to AECOM's higher costings would be $23 billion. Obviously these are substantial amounts of money.

Together with my parliamentary colleague John Alexander I have met with overseas proponents who are prepared to put private sector capital behind the project. There are Japanese and Chinese investors who are prepared to spend serious money. Indeed the completion of the recent trade agreements with China and Japan make the opportunities for such investment all the more attractive. I recently inspected the Chinese VFT and participated in discussions at their Ministry of Railways. China, with its vast population, has a remarkably different economic equation to us for this transport mode. However the various studies recently done, including the AECOM report, show that it is viable.

Let me be clear, my support is not based on some pie-in-the-sky hope that the private sector can fully fund such a project. An objective reading of the research shows that even with private sector involvement there would be a heavy reliance on the public purse. But how is that different from the tens of billions of dollars being spent on urban infrastructure right now for which rural taxpayers see little commercial return to help them meet their cost of living pressures? Regional Australians don't begrudge taxpayer spending on urban infrastructure but seem to cop it when it is used as an excuse for why they don't receive it in return.

And as a final aside, maybe the federal government's interest shouldn't stop there. On the basis that the Capital Metro light rail project in Canberra proceeds I think a cross-border spur line to the regional metropolis of Queanbeyan, with its 43,000 residents, should be added to the ACT Government's master plan for the project.

That is some food for thought on how we can grow regional Australia and attract population away from the choking mega-cities. We could have a Country-City Compact that produces win-win results.

Dr Peter Hendy is the Member for Eden-Monaro

A bullet train in Oz is a dream of mine. All you need to do is look at China's high-speed rail network to see what can possibly be done. Obviously they have an infinitely higher amount of money to spend on it than we do, but I think the idea is definitely there.

Proximity of major cities is our problem. The cities which will benefit from such infrastructure are all too far away!

Yeah, they are quite far apart. Maybe if we had a fast train between them it'd be easier?

Maybe it will also encourage people to live in regional centres that a train like this would service too?

Yeah, they are quite far apart. Maybe if we had a fast train between them it'd be easier?

It's not feasible. The cost of building one versus likely capacity is just not reasonable.

It's not feasible. The cost of building one versus likely capacity is just not reasonable.

Not to mention service. There would be 1000+km of rail in very remote areas that would need much more regular servicing than what our current rail does so the trains could continue to run at high speed.

It's not feasible. The cost of building one versus likely capacity is just not reasonable.

It's one of the top five busiest air routes in the world. The benefits would be innumerable.

Hamburg to Zurich is 895km. There are daily high speed trains which business people and travelers take. Trains run every two hours and take 8 hours. If booked early enough, you could go for 60€. The combined population along the route taken including passengers transferring would be around 10M.

As for Melbourne and Sydney, I think the train should not be aimed at focusing on the two ends of the line, rather linking Wollongong, Goulburn, Canberra, Wagga, Albury and somewhere on the way to Melbourne. While it won't save the daily work commute, it should provide a bit more of an incentive for people to move out of cities. In turn that should lead to growth in regional areas. Having a train going to the north would see the Central Coast, Newcastle and beyond be a place where people could commute from to Sydney. Newcastle to Sydney would take around an hour which is currently at 2 and a half? If we combine the populations of the places served, it'd be near 8M plus an extremely large number of tourists.

Indeed, it would put downward pressure on infrastructure and cost of living in the cities on either end, which is exactly what happened in Japan as outlined in an article above.

Our arguments will be cut down by those insisting Australia is too big but the distance between Melbourne and Sydney is identical to any extended high speed rail route in Japan, Europe, China or the USA. Population is the issue and that is where the plan has to be very careful that it's sustainable and affordable.