Delays at Canberra: why Australia should have built fast rail decades ago

The front-page headlines generated this week by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's promise to link Australia's major eastern cities by fast rail may be seen by many voters as yet another major infrastructure pledge made hurriedly in the run-up to a federal election that is likely to evaporate just as quickly afterwards. Fast intercity rail certainly has form when it comes to being put on the table only to be whipped away again. Linking Australia's two biggest cities by rail would be in the same nation-building category as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, yet we have been talking about it for decades without actually doing it. How different might things be now if Australia had built the Very Fast Train (VFT), first proposed in 1984 by the then CSIRO chairman, Paul Wild. The plan (on which I worked) attracted the support of leading companies of the day, including BHP and Elders IXL, but was bogged down in taxation issues and eventually scrapped in 1991.