High-speed rail has the potential to transform a country by slashing commute times and emissions. But it ain’t cheap. After decades of debate the Albanese government established a High-Speed Rail Authority in 2022 and committed to a $500 million plan for a high-speed rail corridor between Sydney and Newcastle. The dream is for a network to connect regional communities, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra. But could Australia actually have high-speed rail?

Making the negative case in today’s Friday Fight is economist Jason Murphy and arguing in the affirmative is journalist and critic Megan Clement.

I am told that the opposing counsel in this debate about the merits of building high-speed rail in Australia is an economist. To butcher an old aphorism, it is best not to argue with an economist about numbers — you both get dirty and the economist likes it. What I can do is share two contrasting but salutary rail experiences I had this summer.

In France, on the opening day of the Olympic Games, I was caught in the chaos that ensued when a group of saboteurs paralysed France’s high-speed rail network in the hours before the Opening Ceremony, an experience I chronicled for this publication, of which the most distressing fallout was that I had to weep at Celine up the Eiffel Tower the next day on catch-up of instead of live from my sofa in Paris.

As I wrote at the time, the snafu, which was resolved in record time, only showed how vastly valuable the high-speed network — known as the TGV — really is to French life. It boosts internal tourism, supports regional economies and, most importantly, kills demand for that climate villain: domestic flight. 

Not long after, I took the quixotic decision to travel from St Paul, Minnesota to Boston, Massachusetts by Amtrak — a diesel-belching, meandering journey that took longer than driving would have — because this is the closest a European can get to actual time travel to the 1960s. Due to the spectacular inefficiency of the Amtrak route between the Midwest and the north-east of the United States, my fellow passengers were either Amish or rail enthusiasts. A member of the latter group, a train scheduler from Sacramento, sat next to me on the St Paul to Chicago leg and told me that it was his dream to take the train around Australia. Together we bemoaned how difficult, time-consuming and expensive that would be. 

Australia has been trying and failing to build high-speed rail for four decades. The endless feasibility studies have become enough of a running gag to have made it onto Utopia. A world-class rail network is just one of a series of major infrastructure projects we have fumbled in the past half-century of short-termism and small-target politics. Add fast trains to the mass grave that already contains a functioning national broadband network, a fix for the Murray-Darling Basin and a price on carbon. 

But it doesn’t need to be this way. The climate crisis provides us with an opportunity to invest in a high-speed rail line that goes at least from Melbourne to Sydney via Canberra and takes in regional towns in Victoria and New South Wales. 

To address the climate catastrophe, we first of all need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Unfortunately, Australia seems incapable of that under either the Liberals or Labor. What it could do is to seriously invest in getting people out of planes and cars and onto trains. 

The demand is more than there: the Melbourne to Sydney air route is among the world’s busiest, with 150 flights taking off each day. A rail journey of four hours between central stations would provide stiff competition to this 90-minute air journey once the time and cost of commuting to the airport and getting through security are factored in (remember, Melbourne has still not even managed to build a train to the airport in the year of our Lord 2024). Using the French network as a guide, the carbon footprint of this journey would be 14 times smaller than driving and 15 times smaller than flying. 

It is unrealistic to expect high-speed rail to pay for itself straight off the bat, or even, pardon the pun, down the track. We don’t ask the fossil fuel industry to pay for itself — we subsidise it, to the tune of $14.5 billion last year alone. Rail infrastructure is subsidised because of the outsize benefits it brings to citizens. China, Europe and Japan have all understood this. 

The argument that “comparable countries” — i.e. the US and Canada — don’t have high-speed rail is a red herring. Aside from the fact that both countries would benefit greatly from the service, it is generally inadvisable to place oneself in the same category as the only industrialised country in the world without paid parental leave. The US is a cautionary tale in the failure to invest in public services, not somewhere to be emulated. 

The argument that Australia lacks sufficient population density to support high-speed rail is also spurious. In fact, an OECD analysis set out the optimal conditions for a successful high-speed rail line involving a distance of between 400 and 1,000 km, population centres that are large enough to justify up to 20 trips per day and customers with the means to pay. Australia is a wealthy country with two major cities 900km apart. This one really shouldn’t be beyond us as a nation. 

DING! DING! DING! CRIKEY EDITORS DECLARE CLEMENT HAS OFFICIALLY PASSED HER ALLOCATED WORD COUNT.

Instead of propping up polluting industries like air travel, we should be taxing them and reinvesting that money into supporting high-speed rail. There is nothing wrong with providing subsidies to a project that makes life better for Australians and our environment. There is everything wrong with subsidising the very companies responsible for the climate crisis whose actions could soon make the country unliveable. Qantas is one of Australia’s worst emitters, and it was handed $2 billion to survive the pandemic, no strings attached. It is unclear why a cleaner, more convenient form of transport should be held to a higher standard.

The truth is that high-speed rail has more than just environmental benefits. It is the intangible benefits that are the greatest. High-speed rail makes countries smaller. It brings communities closer together. It increases mobility for millions of people, who choose to spend their holidays in their own country, or to build relationships or even businesses between cities because it is so easy to reach them. It shouldn’t just be up to bean counters whether we want to be closer to our fellow Australians. After the parochial squabbling and isolation of the pandemic years, Australians need more than ever to be brought closer together. High-speed rail is popular for a reason — people can already see themselves moving around their country in a different way. They intuitively know that it will be an opportunity for them, not a cost. 

DING! DING! DING! CRIKEY EDITORS DECLARE CLEMENT HAS OFFICIALLY PASSED HER ALLOCATED WORD COUNT BY MORE THAN 200 WORDS!

Take it from someone who can reach the Mediterranean to feel the sea breeze on her face in under three and a half hours. 

Read the opposing argument by Jason Murphy.