Hi All:

It was proposed to me that there were four pressing areas that Australia needed to dedicate resources to, from an infrastructure point of view.

They were:

1) High speed intercity rail links
2) Desalination and water engineering
3) Nuclear energy
4) Fibre-optic communications network

Now, these aren't my suggestions, but I'm throwing them out into the forum to stimulate some thought and conversation. What do you think?

Cheers, Dave.

I agree wholeheartedly that they are the top four priorities for driving our nation forward into the futures, although I would rank it:

Water engineering
Nuclear energy
Rail
Communications

With nuclear energy, desalination and pipelines we can turn back the deserts and open up the arid interior of our country for farming and living.

De-centralisation. The excessive prices of housing and demands on existing infrastructure exists because of supply and demand. A clear solution would be to create lots of new population centers where people can gain meaningful employment. There needs to be development of common facilities - hospitals, schools, shops ect. and recreation facilities. People are leaving regional areas at alarming rates and flocking to the city which stretches limited resources even further. The government needs to be proactive to the point where lots of people even consider leaving the major cities to start a new lifestyle in a new community.

Nuclear energy is a disaster waiting to happen until we get Fusion.

The others are excellent.

The seduction of the techno-fix is apparent. It is too confronting to face the consequences of our impacts

I have been losing sleep about human provoked climate change for nigh on thirty years. In 1992, I suggested “our environment” would become a central concern of humanity in the early 21st century. And so it has! Now my family have graciously said “so you were right!” and apologised for all those “OH! he’s at it again!”

At that time, I was teaching in “systemic agriculture” and “social ecology” and was also a weekend farmer. Yet it was not the references used in the classes, such as Gore’s Earth in the Balance.
One day I sat down and, metaphorically, using the back of an envelope, created an elementary “earth systems model”.

These were the ingredients: (i) an earth globe - showing the finite land masses and oceans; (ii) a geological and evolutionary time line with a tiny dot on it representing 150 years. That number was chosen to be approx. the span of my late fathers life, plus my own and that of our youngest daughter (three people who could talk to each other in 1991); (iii)world population estimates 1908( 1.6 bill. ), 2060 (9.2 bill.) (now seen as an over-estimate; ( 7.2 better)
a range of estimates in creasing propensity t o consume [e.g. 2060 citizen average of 1.8, 2.4....3.6 times the per person consumption in 1908]; (iv) a recognition that the environmetal consequences of a rising population and consumption are lagged: and (iv) a thought experiment in which i applied the model to an island that I could cycle around in a day (PHILIP island).

the longer perspective will show we are not immune from the consequences and i don't have any quick fixes

[James] Water engineering is a branch of civil engineering that involves the storage, movement, and improvement of water. Desalination is an example of it (being a form of improvement) but water engineering involves many different topics, including flood defences, river rehabilitation, and the entire water supply and sewage disposal systems, including the pipes under the street.

Hydrogen might become a useful energy storage method, but it will not become an energy source without nuclear fusion!

A Sydney to Newcastle high speed line may make sense, but Bathurst is a bit far? Isn't it outside the area served by Cityrail? A high speed line that way may be justified eventually, but surely Canberra should be a higher priority destination?

As for internet access, ADSL1 is adequate for most purposes at the moment. Much higher speeds will eventually be needed, but that need should not be used as an excuse to delay anything.