7 August

Most regional towns now hold regular economic forums, large chatfests to try to figure out how to keep the towns viable. The thinking being that the towns need to ‘attract’ business and people. I’m not confident that will ever work. We have it backwards, and history backs me up. The thing that made regional towns originally was the railways. Railways, like all infrastructure, aren’t really technological things. They’re social things. The railways connected the regions, to the cities. That connection is a social connection, it connected the interests of both places, to each other. The towns literally became a part of the big cities. To reinvigorate the interior of Australia, we need to do what the Chinese are doing to reinvigorate their own regions. We need nation-building infrastructure to physically connect them again, to the cities. They’ve built over 50,000 km of high-speed rail to do just this, in only 20 years. Roads too, proper roads. The connection of Sydney to the West of NSW is not much more than a goat track, by international comparisons, and the railways were mostly sidelined by trucks, churning up this goat track. Build the connections, and people and money will not only come. They will stay, because they’ll be connected to the bigger cities. It makes the whole State a big, mutually-connected city.