12 July

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking its East, where the majority of Australians huddle the coast, to its vast, mostly unoccupied interior. Daily now a long queue of vehicles negotiating old, narrow, dangerous roads to try to travel in each direction. And then I saw China’s Chongqing East railway station, recently completed in record time of just over 3 years. Twice the size of the Vatican and 15 times larger than Europe’s largest railway station. Catering to both high speed rail and ordinary rail. China has built over 50,000 km of high-speed rail linking various parts of the country, in less than 20 years. China had to cut, level and reshape an entire mountain, to create this railway station. The speed of construction was assisted by widespread use of AI and construction robots. Its titanium-zinc roof generates over 18 million kW of electricity, and it harvests and recycles enough water to run the entire station. It’s like a self-sustaining living organism. Up to 40 million passengers use the station every year. The bigger point here is that. China built it to help bring its diverse regions into the fold of national life. It’s a cliche, but this is true ‘nation-building’. It’s not just about rail, it’s about engineering a nation, roads, cities, energy etc. Economists always obstruct every plan to do the same with Australia’s link to the West. There’s not the population there to justify big infrastructure works, they say. That’s putting the cart before the horse. ‘Build it and they will come’ would be the better guide. We can’t just blame the big city folk for this either. Every attempt to build anything at all out West now, including the key to its future - renewable energy infrastructure, far and away regional Australia’s greatest strategic asset - is met by a tidal wave of social media-generated pearl-clutching. Data centres will be next, another enormous strategic opportunity for regional Australia, one of the world’s biggest growth industries knocking on the regions’ doors ASKING to invest. Sure to be beached by the armies of pearl-clutching social media zombies and their fake factoids about energy and water use. The regions are held hostage now by a social media culture that turns all progress into debating points for social media groups, producing nothing but rage and hot air, most of whom are prosecuting political arguments imported from the US, with zero relevance to Australia at all. Nation-building means ignoring the bullshit of social media culture, and just getting on with building things. None of our pollies will do it, because their votes also come from the socials. It’s a parasite eating the soul of Australia from the inside-out. China bans most social media. It’s why it can do nation-building and we can’t.