Tell ’em they’re dreamin’!
We have an election on in Australia, the cradle of democracy, and as always in federal elections an enormous number of fringe political parties have crawled out from under their rocks. We have the Rotating Leadership Party, which is running on a platform of giving every person in Australia the chance to be prime minister for a day; the anti-Maritime party, which believes that floating on water is a satanic act and is opposed to all forms of shipping; and the Sex Party, which actually has pretty good policies. Who could be opposed to more sex? But in amongst these fringe parties we also have some single-issue groups, and in my opinion the most single issue of the lot is the Bullet Train for Australia Party. Their policies are reviewed here, and can be summarized very simply as: bullet train. This is pure science fiction at its best. Their slogan might confuse non-Australians, since it appears to advocate voter fraud:
Vote Bullet Train! Then vote as you normally would …
This is not because of special Australian laws giving nerdy train-spotters two votes each, but because of our complicated preference system, which is itself a work of science fiction and impossible for ordinary mortals to understand. But I think the Bullet Train for Australia Party has summarized their preference policy very nicely in that slogan. I also like the way their website has Australianized the bullet train by getting some pictures of Japanese bullet trains and sticking a kangaroo on them. Who could possibly hate kangaroos? And how can any technological or industrial advance be alien to Australia if it has a kangaroo on it?
The reason I think that this is basically science fiction is that there is no way a bullet train will ever be a profitable enterprise in Australia. We have 22 million people spread out over an area the size of the Magellan Cloud, living in little clusters of “civilization” separated by vast expanses of nothing. By way of comparison, Japan has 120 million people living in an area the size of Japan, with cities not too far apart that have populations the same size as Australia. That’s why they can run a train between those cities at light speed every 15 minutes, at something resembling a profit. But even then, catching a bullet train in Japan is no cheaper than flying – just enormously more convenient and comfortable. If you cut out all the in between stops (because no decent towns exist), doubled the distance between cities and then reduced the eligible population by a factor of 6 or 10, would it still be cheaper than flying? Especially given the electricity demands? And would it still be 8x more efficient than flying? And would you use a bullet train to get from Sydney to Adelaide? That’s a 21 hour bus trip at 120 km an hour, so probably a 7 hour bullet train trip. Or a 1 hour flight. Hmm, which would you choose? The only way that a bullet train would become an efficient program in Australia is if the Rotating Leadership Party were to seriously act on its on-again off-again “Big Australia” ideas, and double Australia’s population. Then, if the extra people settled in the right places, maybe it would work out.
Good luck with that.
As an aside, I am intrigued by the modern opposition to high speed rail in the UK, where it might actually be a viable investment. Apparently the HSR will cost 80 billion pounds to build, and this is a ludicrous amount of money that no modern government can afford. I haven’t done the numbers but I have a strong suspicion that the Japanese shinkansen would have cost a significantly larger portion of GDP when it started in 1958 than HSR would cost in the UK now. Had the Japanese adopted modern craven attitudes towards government spending, they would never have got the bullet train. Yet they have the bullet train, and somehow their society seems to have survived the massive fiscal impost. Could it be that sometimes massive government investment is a good idea? Which isn’t to say that the HSR is the best use of 80 billion pounds of British money, but “it’s a lot of money” doesn’t seem to me to be the best argument against it either …
Anyway, the Bullet Train for Australia Party are definitely pursuing a crazy science fiction policy, though it would be a pretty cool sight to see a bullet train heading through the desert – on the run from Darwin to Adelaide I imagine it would be able to get up to some pretty phenomenal speeds in the open spaces around Uluru. You could even build a tunnel through Uluru so it doesn’t have to deviate – then instead of climbing the rock, people can say they sped through it in a microsecond. Or you could lay the train nearby, and take iconic pictures of the bullet train shooting past the rock – contrast of old and new, etc. Japanese railways love the picture of a train running through rice paddies with hills in the background, this could be the Australian equivalent. Except that there would be only one person in the train, and enough energy to power the entire city of Darwin being used to propel it.
I think there’ll be a maglev on Mars before there is a bullet train from Adelaide to Darwin. But at least the Bullet Train for Australia Party have cornered the train-spotting vote!
Compromise and Conceit 
August 22, 2013 at 9:37 pm
Actually, the Melbourne-Sydney air route is one of the busiest in the world. A high speed train could save the need to upgrade or replace the airports at both ends, and Canberra is a decent sized stop in between. And Sydney airport will need to be moved anyway in the next 2-3 decades, due to rising sea levels and worse storms (it’s only just above sea level). But that’s one corner of Australia – you are right that the other centres are too small and too distant from each other to warrant the cost.
August 22, 2013 at 10:42 pm
I’ll pay that. I guess it’s possible that the entire Japanese shinkansen network is basically subsidized by the Tokyo-Osaka route…
August 23, 2013 at 11:12 am
“I also like the way their website has Australianized the bullet train by getting some pictures of Japanese bullet trains and sticking a kangaroo on them.”
Does it show the Australian bullet train running in front of Mt Fuji? Though when I think about it, I’d probably like faster/easier transit to Japan.
“The reason I think that this is basically science fiction is that there is no way a bullet train will ever be a profitable enterprise in Australia.”
“Actually, the Melbourne-Sydney air route is one of the busiest in the world.”
The last I recall on this was that a cost/benefit study was done as part of the deal between Labor/Greens in 2010 and the results showed it was a bad idea. This Crikey article appears to support that understanding [1]: http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/11/29/jump-on-a-properly-costed-high-speed-train/?wpmp_switcher=mobile
[1] Specifically it calls out that even Melbourne/Sydney or Canberra/Sydney are non-viable ideas.
August 23, 2013 at 1:40 pm
I thought it had two trains next to each other – did it have Fuji behind them? If so that’s really cheap editing, it should have been Uluru!
I have a vague memory of a cost/benefit study finding it would be disastrous. I wonder if the original shinkansen had a cost-benefit study done?
August 26, 2013 at 7:56 pm
“I wonder if the original shinkansen had a cost-benefit study done?”
Probably not. The question associated with that should be “In retrospect, was it a good idea?” as it’s pretty easy to just enjoy the benefits once the money is spent, but that doesn’t make it a good idea it just makes it a cool thing you spent too much money on and my house is already full of stuff like that…
August 27, 2013 at 9:20 am
It could be an interesting research task to go back and look at ridiculously expensive projects that were not subject to a cost-benefit analysis, and to see how they have shaped up. Also from the point of view of unrealized costs it would be interesting to find projects that did have cost-benefit studies done well, and see what unexpected benefits and costs arose in the lifetime of operation of the project. For the former I’m thinking the shinkansen, the Snowy Hydro scheme, and the dam system on the Yellow River. For the latter I can’t think of any easily, but maybe the non-construction of the Franklin dam would have had benefits (e.g. tourism) and costs (loss of access to forest resources) that could not have been anticipated at the time. Also sometimes projects have anticipated benefits (e.g. the mysterious explosion in virtual business that will occur after hte introduction of the NBN) or expected savings (every IT project ever) that don’t get realized. It would be interesting to see what kind of grand claims don’t get realized, and what kind of unexpected benefits do.
Case in point: Margaret Thatcher closing the UK coal mines. Huge health benefits accrued to Britain through the switch to gas; big environmental benefits through reduced sulfides; and ultimately it locked away a huge tranche of carbon that we definitely now cannot afford to dig up. I don’t think Thatcher had any of that in mind when she rammed that policy through.
It seems that the ALP is going to scope out a bullet train, and there is a new report out suggesting it could be cost-effective. Whatever next!
August 27, 2013 at 6:16 pm
“and there is a new report out suggesting it could be cost-effective”
Interesting. Where? I’ve only seen Kevin Rudd announce that he would be funding another study into it.
I’d love a bullet train to Sydney. I just don’t love it enough to shell out money when I’m not using it (i.e. provide subsidies).
August 29, 2013 at 11:00 am
Hmm, I think I saw the report mentioned on the Guardian’s election live blog, which means it is lost to the mists of time. I could have misread though, my attention span drops into the milliseconds when I start reading a “blog style” news report.
If you object to providing subsidies you’re probably living in the wrong polity …
August 29, 2013 at 4:18 pm
It depends on the type of subsidy. Middle class welfare is irritating [1] and the metro trains subsidy from state governments irrational for the quality of service provided. The endless money provided to car manufacturers to provide progressively fewer jobs for massive costs is a classic example of how subsidies for politic purposes have managed to ensure the eventual death of something that may have survived if forced to confront the real world two decades ago.
On the other hand, if you mean “universal healthcare” or “the dole” then I can see how they could be classified as subsidies, but I wouldn’t personally see them as such despite the similarity of the cashflow.
But assuming you just mean the Australian governments propensity to give a wad of cash to any business claiming to employ X people, then yeah…
[1] And Abbott’s maternity leave policy even more so.
August 30, 2013 at 12:58 am
I was also thinking of the huge subsidies that the fossil fuel industry receives, the huge government subsidies for roads, the private healthcare rebate, and the special tax breaks that rich people get for superannuation – tax breaks that are set to get even more egregious if Abbot wins the election and abolishes the low income rebate. Most of these are middle class welfare, but others – like the subsidies for roads – are a form of social engineering intended to create a certain type of society. Subsidies to create a certain kind of society are, I guess, what all non-libertarian societies are about, and you have to be cool with them (politics is really just a debate about which subsidies get more weight in a particular time period). Middle-class welfare, on the other hand, is just a straight-out electoral bribe, and since the advent of the Howard govt it has become a shameless practice. Howard had a pretty much explicit policy of what I think we should call Keynesian vote buying: he built up surpluses between elections and ran them down in election years, buying off constituencies he thought would vote for him while simultaneously guaranteeing that if he lost the election the opposition would have no money for their own promises. Rudd of course is currently shamelessly doing the same thing[1], and Abbott too, so it’s clear that the new normal in Australian politics is Keynesian vote buying. So if you don’t want subsidies I think you’re in the wrong country.
On the one hand I think Abbott’s maternity leave policy is a classic example of this; but on the other hand it’s nice to see the Liberals catching up to what has been public policy in “sexist” Japan for at least 10 years already. Of course here it is based on a social insurance system, so when you get your 60% salary for a year (yes, Japanese maternity leave is really that good) it’s because you contributed a proportion of your salary to the social insurance system. It’s probably not enough to cover the whole thing, but at least individuals made a contribution to their own welfare. In Abbott’s system, a couple of big companies pay for everyone to get it.
(Though, I have to wonder – do any of the big companies on whom the contributions will be levied actually pay anything resembling the headline company tax? I’m guessing that when Abbott ratchets up the company tax by 1.5% on those companies, they’ll just give their lawyers a 30% pay rise and say “find a way to pay 1.5% less tax”. Which will leave the govt carrying the can for the whole thing. But funnily enough our media are too busy talking about Kevin Rudd’s fringe and Therese Rein’s surname to actually bother interrogating policy).
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fn1: while blowing some pretty audible racist dog-whistles, the fucker
January 20, 2014 at 11:27 pm
The Bullet Train party has popped up again, with comedian Anthony Ackroyd (impersonating Kevin Rudd) contesting the Griffith by-election from his home in New South Wales.
Strangely enough, Ackroyd has got the Green Party’s first preference. He is also at 5 on the ballot paper.
Their policies? Two words: “Bullet Train.”
Their candidates / MPs are also instructed to abstain from voting on anything that is not “Bullet Train.”
Not much of a local rep.
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As for the whole matter of Shinkansens for Australia — even though there is the population density (on the eastern seaboard) to justify a Brisbane-Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne network (which would be about the same length as the Japanese network) — the Australian way of running trains would turn a Shinkansen-style system into an unmitigated disaster.
No Australian operator would be prepared to spend the money on maintaining the track, overhead wires and rollingstock to the required standard (JR Central send 3,500 gangers out every night to maintain the Tokaido Shinkansen route — a distance equivalent to that between Brisbane and Gladstone.
And they would probably try to keep the stock in service for a century, too.
January 20, 2014 at 11:34 pm
Terangeree! Welcome back! It sounds like the Bullet Train Party have gone even narrower in their focus. I wonder if there are many trainspotters in Griffith?
I also can’t see Australia being able to maintain a Japanese approach to train service. I remember reading a letter to the SMH once (back when people wrote letters to the editor instead of ranting to the aether on an unread blog) by someone saying “face it, guys, this is Australia. If you want European or Asian style trains, you’ll have to move, because Australians just don’t have the attitude to make it work.”
Infrastructure. Anglo-saxon society just doesn’t understand the concept.
January 24, 2014 at 4:54 pm
Well, if they want a HST to terminate in Griffith, it would have to stop short of the Brisbane River at South Brisbane 🙂