- The election is still surely Tony Abbott’s for the taking, but when the evening news starts talking about hubris, alarm bells should go off in the Liberal camp. There’s no hubris, but Abbott’s drastic cutback in his media appearances and his refusal to debate Gillard suggests he knows he’s in front and wants to sit on his lead. It’s the sort of frontrunner strategy that Labor was foolish to adopt at the outset of the campaign and the Liberals would be foolish to adopt now. With just over two weeks left, that’s 16 24-hour media cycles or, in less mathematical phrasing, an eternity.
- Trains lose money. High speed trains lose money at high speed. But the best part is, you can waste tens of millions of dollars on them without ever building a single bit of track, which Labor proposes with its high speed rail study. So as a public service, I hereby make this offer to Anthony Albanese: while I swore that wild teams of locomotives would never drag me back to rail issues, I’m willing to do your high-speed rail feasibility study for free if you manage to get back into government. Yep, for absolutely nothing. You can save $20m. And it’ll be more rigorous than what you’ll get from your expensive hand-picked consultants – if it’s rigour you actually want.
- Despite Kevin Rudd’s – by his recent standards – extravagant endorsement of the Gillard Government last night, his reappearance should be sufficient to ensure another day is spent by the Press Gallery interrogating the Rudd issue. Perhaps the Prime Minister can just start her press conferences by tossing a shiny thing into the midst of the hacks. It would have pretty much the same effect.
- A nice get by a commenter at the Canberra blog The RiotACT, who spotted that the so-called “Alliance of Australian Retailers”, which is the front for a Big Tobacco push against plain-packaging laws and the ALP, has an awful lot in common with an astro-turfing effort in New Zealand where the “Association of Community Retailers” turned out to be funded by the tobacco industry.
I usually admire Bernard keane’s incisive writings, but I was a bit upset to read his facile dismissal of trains as a useful and economical mode of transport. Certainly, so-called Very Fast Trains, or VFTs (250-300 km/hr) are expensive to instal and need a long time to pay back the investment (if ever – it depends upon the usefulness to the customer base). However, modern fast trains (100-160 kn/hr) are almost certainly going to be the transport medium of the future. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that population growth and food growing requirements are going to push people further out into the hinterland (read Bill McKibben’s book Eaarth (2 ‘a’s) for a detailed analysis as to why). The second is that, because renewable energy installations need large areas in ever more remote locations, trains are the best-placed mode of transport to take advantage of it. In other words, they can follow the power, in ways that diesel trains cannot.
If anyone is interested, Google on “The re-engineering of Australia” to find my blog on sustainable population, where trains will feature prominently.
Your attacks on Gillard are becoming very tedious Bernard. Seems you have allowed some of Abbotts attitude to females rub off on you.
Re. high speed rail – speeds are also increasing to the 400km/hr mark without having which makes the long runs Sydney-Brisbane and Sydney-Melbourne more competitive with air at much lower cost than Maglev. The technology is advancing dramatically and also being more widely used, which will bring costs down further.
Don’t forget that an expansion of, or replacement for, Sydney Airport isn’t going to happen (after 60 years of failed attempts) and if Sydney isn’t going to run up against major interstate travel bottlenecks some other means of transport is going to be needed, so the project is vastly in Sydney’s long term interests. But that assumes that anyone in Sydney (not just the government) is looking beyond their next property coup ;-). Even if a site is found for a second Sydney airport and persisted with (ROFLMAO!) the cost of setting it up is going to be a high proportion of setting up a high speed rail link.
Re. Alliance of Australian Retailers, I saw their shill on morning TV a few days ago. The “argument” is that plain packaging will do nothing to reduce cigarette consumption, but will nevertheless hit small shops. Well the only way I can see this happening is from from less cigarette sales. It gets better – she advocated instead increased government funding for anti-smoking campaigns. But wouldn’t they also affect retail sales of cigarettes? WTF????!!!!!! My only conclusion is that the tobacco industry thinks that plain packaging is a greater threat than anti-smoking advertising. If we’ve got these murderous c***s scared, good.
Another comment on Bernard Keane’s quips about railways. he can sneer at the costs of evaluating a VFT line, but in fact an intensive analysis is really necessary. To run at high speeds (and as Malcolm Street points out, speeds are increasing all the time), a track which runs dead straight for many kilometres is required and when you absolutely must change direction, the curves must be of very large radius. This is because the track must be superelevated (that is the outside rail must be raised relative to the inside rail) to counter the effects of centrifugal force and if the radius is too small, the passengers are travelling for miles at the same sort of angle that airplanes turn into Sydney airport at. The consequence is that getting hold of the land is very disruptive to pre-existing land usage and it may be necessary to check a number of different alignments to find the one that causes least angst to the citizenry through whose land it travels (i.e. political expediency) yet provides optimum services along the way. If you get the contract from Albanese, Bernard, as an ex-railway engineer, I will be happy to come and help you and I promise not to laugh at your frustrations more than once in each kilometre.