6 April

If we spent the proceeds of the mining boom (one of my pet ideas, apologies if you've had it inflicted on you before) on building high speed rail WEST from Sydney or Melbourne out into the rest of Australia - that part west of Penrith, Sydney folk, where dragons live - we could have changed the whole country. That would dissolve a big chunk of the city/country divide in one go, and people could live way out into the regions if they wanted to and still commute. It would make location almost irrelevant. Instead we pissed the lot up against a wall in tax cuts to people who didn't need them. And when we do talk about high speed rail, we talk about Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra. We need people out of those places, not in them.