The purpose of this blog is to start a conversation on issues that are important to us all.  It is not designed to be political, but by its nature will certainly drive political responses. Having said that I want all people of any political persuasion to step out of the current cesspit of global politics and to start engaging in conversations on issues that are important to us all.

I live in Melbourne, Australia and I am a social progressive but I was encouraged by the work of a Sydney based conservative MP, John Alexander @JohnAlexanderMP, who has advocated the use of high speed rail to address the problems of housing affordability.  This is simply a perfect solution to a major problem. It addresses the social issue of mobility in large cities. But it also casts the conversation around enabling people in far flung communities to access the major cities for employment.

All too often, critics try to shoot down high speed rail on the back of a business case that doesn’t quite work out as it is near on impossible to prove the numbers because we can never understand the future.  It is what one futurist, Roy Amara, best summed up as this dilemma:  “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. In other words, our understanding of change is only related to our knowledge of the present.  It is fundamentally difficult for anyone to gauge the future without knowing the scale of change that will occur over time.  So when we consider technology changes such as high speed rail, automated (driverless) transport, etc, we can only realistically do so in the context of our knowledge of today.

So what I will suggest is that we let the future take hold.  Manage our conversations based on what might be … rather than what we can currently see.

In this context, can you imagine a time when a train will leave Geelong, stop at Avalon,   loop into Tullamarine and then run into Ballarat before heading to Bendigo.  All the while taking people on the high speed (and I mean really fast) journey to their destinations.  Will this let people live in remote locations while at the same to enjoying low cost housing but being able to work in the city?  Too right it will!

How cool is that?

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