Why doesn’t Australia have high speed rail? | ABC News

Classic case of you can’t have nice things.

I don’t think we need a high speed rail

“America doesn’t have bullet trains”

Acela: “am I a joke to you?”

If the Melbourne to Sydney is one of the busiest route in the world then why say we just don’t have the population who will travel?? Doesn’t make sense!
Why nobody wants to speak truth? Maybe they don’t want to build high speed trains because of airlines companies who don’t want this to happen.

If there is high speed rail to connect smaller new city's between Melbourne and Sydney, the average tax cost of $10,000 per person could easily be justified because house prices in the new city's would surely be significantly lower. This would also lower the cost of a home in the major cities as the demand for these Mel/Syd homes would be alleviated.

VERY
FAST
TRAIN
😂😅😆🤣

I don’t know much about politics or anything, but I do know that this country’s tax system is literally one of the highest in the world. Where does the money that we pay even go ? Nothing seems to be technologically advanced in this country

I’d rather see Brisbane to Perth high speed rail, with a spur heading to Darwin from Adelaide

So Qld Tilt Train is not High Speed Rail?

This goes under ‘you can’t have nice things’ file.

They are too busy wasting billions on road tunnels increasing congestion not reducing it, like in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne

Just proves how stupid Australia is, Sydney and Melbourne are approaching London in population sizes, Australia as a population is thin centralised along a small corridor between Sydney and Melbourne. The train could be built down the Hume highway right of way.

1. Would have to be elevated to avoid wildlife and the morons who don't know how to check for trains when crossing a rail line.
2. Government project estimated in 2022 to cost $128B so say $150B in 2024 which means actual cost would be $500B. (Snowy Hydro 2.0 anyone?)
3. Assume annual running costs of 1% of the projected build cost so $1.5B (I know nothing about this sort of thing so could be less but likely more).
4. Interest on the loan to build it on the projected build cost assuming you can borrow at 2% would be $3B a year.
5. Currently 30,000 people a day fly the Syd – Mel route. Assuming you could convince 10,000 of those people to switch you'd be looking at $1,230 a ticket just to break even on running and interest costs before you even look at covering the build cost. Even if you can pick up another 2,000 per day because it stops along the way you're looking at an average ticket price of $1,030 and that is assuming you have the capacity to do so.

We just have to pray that Elon Musk comes out next with Teleporters

there is no WiFi connection on XPT between Syd and Melbourne…something thats available in the third world. TGV Paris to Marseille or Tokaido Sanyo Shinkansen is about the same distance Syd/Mel with sub $200 tickets. US and Canada not having it is hardly an argument for Australia. its an excuse.

Australia perhaps no money to built it, u.s.a. has chance to do it, lots bureaucracy involved to build it

Unsurprising that the Grattan Institute opposes HS rail, supported as it is by fossil fuel corporations. The fact is the whole World is heavily invested in HS rail with few exceptions. That is because there are benefits and advantages in doing so. Europe is fast becoming completely interconnected with HS rail, so much so that France is on the verge of banning internal commercial flights. Economically a HS rail is a magnet for investment in both services and construction, new homes etc., and not just for business travellers. As others have commented, if you can build submarines for A$300+bn then so can HS be built. Commit to the future.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Indonesia has built the first high-speed train in the Southern Hemisphere countries, named Whoosh!

Indonesia's high speed train said hi…

When it comes to big infrastructure and the Australian Government it is not looking good. As an example, The NBN and fiber network, 4x over budget and still using copper.

Ooh, I know why! It's because politicians get free business class flights and Qantas Club memberships.

This concept is way, way too large for Australians to deal with. My opinion.

A high speed train from Brisbane to Melbourne through Sydney and Canberra would be great.
Only problem is that there is always something else that we would want more.
People look at figures in the tens or hundreds of billions like they're just meaningless numbers… the government prints money after all.

But it's not the money itself, it's the allocation of resources that the money represents. It's the things that people building this line would not be doing.
Not be building the urban transport that you will use every day.
Not building the housing for you children to live in.
Not coming to fix your toilet.
Not upgrading your local park.
Not working in another industry.

The government can print money to buy people's houses along the rail corridor.
Now we have people with sacks of money and no house, a few less houses to go around AND the people with construction skills are busy with making a new rail line.
Where are these people going to live? Well, they will have the money to pay a bit more for a house. But the prices for existing houses and new construction will inevitably go up until someone else misses out.

The government can print money, but it can't print houses, materials or labour. That stuff is all dependent on the hard work of the Australian people, which is mostly finite.

Unemployment is low. Your compatriots are already really busy doing things that you need them to do. The things in the way of where the rail line needs to go is already serving their purposes. Spending $128B on a rail line is just taking a huge fraction of everything you enjoy today and diverting it to this one thing that you're not going to use very often.

Because we have higher speed air travel.!

Japan is 20 times smaller with 100 million more people. Its a horrible comparison. Russia, USA, Canada & Brazil all have big land mass and big populations yet none have high speed rail.

So the solution would be to allow more people in the country and grow our cities to have these things, you look at Japan for instance, i went there, and a bottle of water in a vending machine was about 1 dollar 20, you wonder how they are so cheap? Because they got more people, more tax paying money, and they can be able to afford all of this, Australia needs at least 50 million people to get the resources we need to build a high speed rail, more workers, more tax money, better economy

hahaha indonesian now using high speed train

just fix the line you have, forget high speed rail, get fast rail up and running

"Our cities are too small and are too far apart."

What is she even talking about? Melbourne (over 5m), Canberra (500k) and Sydney (5.3m) are larger cities than what France has connected on its Marsailles (1.7m), Lyon (1.1m) and Paris (2.8m) line. Distance is also no argument as the distance between Paris and Marsailles (around 800 km) is comparable to the distance between Sydney and Melbourne (around 850 km). The only thing stopping you is that you don't want to invest the money in this project. So stop lying and at least be honest about your actual intentions.

Sad you have no technologies to build it just like America……..!!!!!!!!!

6:11 Grattan Institute is funded by fossil fuel giant BHP lol. The Grattan Institute and other "think tanks" also get millions of dollars from the Australian government. No wonder we don't have any money to spare for high speed rail

The new High Speed System would be called the RSX or RAPID SPEED EXPRESS

Price everything and the value of nothing.

Australia spend billions dollars make weapons with US but for infrastructure need a lot of meetings

Amazing how we could spend $360 billion for 8 submarines and allocate nothing for this.

114 billion dollars – so less than half the cost of the submarine program. Just sayin’