A client of ours who had recently come back from a trip to France, made two comments within quick succession where you could say that one has begat the other. In the first instance she complained that France has lovely high-speed trains and that the government should step out of the way and let private enterprise build them here. In the second instance, she complained about having to pay "all this tax" despite the fact that a great deal of her income is taxed at the rate of 0% because of the superannuation rules; which means her effective tax rate is in fact lower than mine.
I do not know if you want to take the philosophical argument that taxation allows government spending, or that government spending happens and that taxation retires the debt which exists by virtue of the government having already spent the money (I do not care if you are Hayekian, Keyneisan, Friedmanish, or an MMT bro') but it seems to me that if private enterprise wanted to build high-speed rail in Australia that they would have bent the arm of government to do so, and given the fact that we now have toll-roads swiss-cheesing their way left, right, and criss-cross across Sydney, that government would have been happy to throw many billions of dollarpounds at them in order to do so. We have not high-speed rail in Australia because there is no political will to do so. We have not high-speed rail in Australia because there is no commericial enterprise which either has the ability to raise that kind of capital nor that sees the commerical benefits in building it. At best we have commerical freight rail which wants to freeload off of public-built rails, some highly effective suburban rail in the major cities, and mostly anaemic not-very-high-speed rail in Australia.
Let's be honest, transportation in Australia has always been a hilariously stupid joke, told by second-rate business people, to a third-rate electorate, resulting in fourth-rate infrastructure. We don't have high-speed rail to speak of. We don't really have anything resembling world-class motorways. We have a few airports which are all owned by merchant banking corporations. The vehicles which we run over those pieces of infrastructure are also the result of a hilariously stupid joke. Although we have a few custom coach builders who build buses, some trains and assemble trams, we have no automotive industry to speak of. We can't even build our own ships and/or submarines despite living on an island.
We are not allowed to have a lovely high-speed train network, not because government needs to step out of the way and let private enterprise built them here but rather, that government has been deliberately made mostly derelict and private enterprise simply refuses to build what is not profitable for them. Actually, this can be said with every single piece of major wide-scale infrastructure in Australia, where physical connections were necessary; be it road, rail, gas, electric, water, sewerage, telephony, internet, et cetera, that the only reason that any private enterprise has any of these things at all is because governments of the past built them and the current tories who now own them, have inherited them them after paying cents in the dollar (if that) for them.
Elsewhere in the world, other nations are obviously better at us than this. The TGV, or Train de Grand Vitesse, came about after the oil crisis of the 1970s and France set about building itself a high-speed rail network with the intent of future-proofing itself against other oil crises. SNCF is a government owned and operated rail company. France is pretty sharp when it comes to state owned companies, and it speaks volumes that the largest electricity provider in the UK is EDF which is Electricite Direct France. Even before Brexit, tory governments in Britain brexited the British Government from Britain.
As I write this in 2024, we mark the 60th anniversary of the Shinkansen in Japan. Generation-0 or Zero-ken, was built in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics; which were held as a way for Japan to show that it had reentered the civilised world after making an empire for itself, then losing the empire and symbolically being punished with two nuclear weapons dropped on it. In 1964, Zero-ken had regular operational speeds which touched 210km/h. To the best of my knowledge Australia has had exactly one train reach 210km/h and that was in Queensland and on a specific test run. I know not of any other train in Australia to ever go above 200km/h.
The obvious argument why Australia can not have high speed rail is that Australia is big. That bigness is an impediment to even bothering to try; so we don't. The problem with this argument is that Japan now has a high speed rail network which is vast and extensive, and long, and built over mountainous terrain, and built in a country prone to earthquakes. The actual reason why Australia can not have high speed rail is incompetence and stupidity. I note that the big nations across the Anglosphere all suffer from this impediment. Canada has no high speed rail to speak of. The United States is beholden to the motor car. Australia is just whatever our big brothers say we are.
The weird thing is that some Australians have seen nice trains. We know what nice trains are. I live in a city with double-deck suburban rail cars; which gunzels might not like but I think are pretty excellent. Even here in Sydney, when the electric train network was properly opened in 1926, it wasn't until 1988 that all the lines were fully electrified. Nevertheless and despite the fact that the way found for most of the railways in my fair city is now getting on for a hundred plus years old, the trains that we do have are nice.
Paradoxically it is people like this client of ours who thinks that the government should step out of the way and let private enterprise build nice trains here who through the ballot box, perpetually ensures that that will never be the case. These people are NIMBYs (Not In My BackYard) who object to YIMBYs (Yes, In My BackYard) while the PIMBYs (Please, In My BackYard) get to sit in traffic because railways aren't built. Meanwhile, they get to go on lovely holidays which are mostly funded by tax free incomes and still complain about having to pay "all this tax", where they will then ride on nice trains which other nations have deemed it a good idea to pay "all this tax" to have.
No comments:
Post a Comment