HYPER-TRAVEL

Even though the developers of hyper-travel systems are having teething problems in 2018 doesn't mean that by 2028 those problems would have been solved. Twenty years ago nobody ever though about the Internet as we know it, and the potential for paperless communications, fifteen years ago the fully electric car was all but science fiction and even ten years ago the self-driving car the stuff of comic books. 

Given that our government cannot get any large infrastructure built within twenty years of conception, waste billions in the processes of consultation, development and legal challenges picking up and dropping ideas around the electoral cycle and refusing to admit intelligent people into the public service, nothing gets done without a lot of argument and angst.

As a result a fetish for developing uniquely Australian products rather than just buying fully tested and operational off-the-shelf projects preferably of Australian origin and manufacture has become the norm. The end product is that political interference in major projects have proved disastrous and we begin to look like a third-world banana republic.

Given the tyranny of distance of our nation cross-country transport is an essential part of our economy and is need to drive growth. What we face is the fact that after 150 years no government service has ever been able to keep wheels on trains let alone get them to run on time.  What have the fat cats of the railways services been doing for the last century and a half?

Well, now our government has got the idea that, like Battleships, they want to build a fast train system that is bound to be both out of date and inferior to the possible transport alternative twenty or thirty years in the future. We will have a Fast Train between Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane by 2045. That's the promise they believe they want to make. By the year 2045 even aeroplanes may be a thing of the past so why begin building what exists now instead of looking to a future that holds cheaper and faster transport alternatives.

The readers of H.G Wells, Alex Asimov, Peter Singer, Timothy Leary or even Ray Bradbury would see that after science fiction there sometimes becomes science fact.
The troubled Hyper-loop may be the future, with our topography and distances, but that and other futuristic transport systems need to be explored and considered.

What we need our government to do is to firstly stop the brain-drain to America and China by actually putting the money where their mouth is about developing a innovative and inventive economy, allow the intelligence of our community free reign,  waste not money on unwinnable wars but invest it instead in the CSIRO and other research organisations so that they can attract the best brains for the best projects.

Australia needs desperately to look far into the future, not just tomorrow or the next election. We need Statesmen to build a nation, not a superannuation nest-egg. We need government workers with the freedom and flexibility to innovate and improve their roles, we need imagination not migration, we need faith in ourselves and not continue to be the lick-spittle of international bullies, we have the ability to go it alone without the help of any other nation, we need fire in our bellies and under our arses. We need a hyper-government for a hype- future and not the Flat Earth Society residing in Canberra..

FREE HISTORY LESSONS

Australia has much to thank Captain James Cook for. Even though he was an illegal boat person landing upon the shores of Terra Australis, denying the aboriginal population the right to say who comes to their country and under what circumstances they come, he did introduce the concept that if the land was Terra Nullius, in that there was nothing here, a whole lot of people in chains could arrive bringing with them their family pets, dogs, cats, foxes and rabbits.

His foresight in positioning Australia to take advantage of this Asian Century, he believed that the West, Sydney with its pure Anglo bloodlines, would eventually move towards the East, Kathmandu as the economic center of the world and take it over as well. Historians of the day told us that the Chinese were too backward and that the Japanese had poor eyesight and thus no foresight, our future would lay somewhere between here and London via Seth Efrica. Of course it was proven some time later that what lay between us and the Mother country via Seth Efrica would see us pouring all our treasure into those fractious, tribal states to keep them from committing Genocide on each other and Australia prostituting itself to pay for it.

Of course Captain Cook believed that America at that time, a rambunctious adolescent nation, desperate to rid themselves of the English language and King …….. , would never amount to anything if they didn’t have a Monarchy to lord it over them. This was well before the Trump reign.

His mistake was corrected geographically when the Japanese who couldn’t see straight decided to re-arrange the Eastern World. They failed but drew our attention to the fact that the fertile crescent would be a nightmare and the Far East - China (so called because of the hegemony of the West) would eventually dictate to us what we had tried for decades to dictate to them.

Another huge error was to not harness the environmental power of our original inhabitants, or even the physical power for that matter, as Terra Nullius denied their very existence. The idea that a nation, a culture, a civilisation could exist without landholders, streets, shops and civic centerers was pure fantasy. A parcel of land, regardless of its size, could not call itself a country unless it had a flagpole to show the world that it was civilized.

Of course without vegetarian environmentalists, later to be called the Greens, Cook envisaged Botany Bay to be the place to put Oil Refineries and Chemical Works while further North in Sydney Harbour subsequent wandering seafarers would put a city, with its bridges and tunnels and houses built right down to the waters edge occupied by the twin evils Prime Ministers, Catholic Archbishops and Drug Lords.. The whole idea of reserving the harbour for the rich and powerful, was to keep anything dirty and smelly as far away as possible while the stench of industry was good for the healthy development of the working classes to the West of the city it offended the sensitivities of the political class.

Nothing was thought wrong with the concept of placing several of the countries tanning works, rubbish dumps and heavy industry at Mascot, which, years later would prove to be a nose destroying entry to Sydney if you arrived by flying machine. The rich those days traveled by ’Liner’ via Aden for cheap shit on the way.

It would be half a century or more later when John Batman (Great-uncle of Bruce Wayne) saw the potential of digging holes all around Ballarat but living in the unpolluted atmosphere of Melbourne. His attraction to Gold was only to be superseded by that of Brown Coal an equivalent distance to the East of Melbourne as Ballarat, again to keep as much soot as possible from the clothes lines of the aristocracy. This brown coal, cheap, nasty and highly polluted could be used to power the boilers of the era of steam, heralding the use of railways to get more people into Myers Department store and the products of industry out to the country. This tradition of bringing the countries wealth to Melbourne and shipping its rubbish back out to the country would go on for a long time, but now the rubbish comes from China via Port Melbourne.

The City Planners of Melbourne and Sydney saw no need to design anything further than there eyes could see, a tradition dating back to the time of the Pharoahs, this land would always just be a suburb for Mother England, a place to strip away its wealth, and like shit to the countryside, a place to dump its boat people, crooks and vagabonds housed in rotting hulks on the Thames River.

Who would guess two centuries later that Australia would treat its new boat people the same way shifting them from rotting hulks from Indonesia onto the shores of New Guinea, Port Moresby being seen by the rulers of Australia as Sydney had been to the rulers of Great Britain. A good place to send your rubbish and bring back much plunder.

Anyway, the planners only laid out a city for a few hundred thousand people, not that many Britain's would want to come to this God-forsaken land unless it was to vandalise it. Here it was thought that, like the aboriginals, the crooks would eventually breed themselves out by being absorbed in the advanced civilisation of the West. The explosive growth of Australia after 1945 put paid to the fact that we would remain a British backwater nation, great for cattle, sheep and minerals. Since we had cut the apron strings of Britain they could not hold us back any longer, and, following the war would begin to tie ourselves closer to those rebellious Americans and leave Britain to sink under the weight of it’s faux-supremacy and Margaret Thatcher.

It is little known that William Solander once wandered around the fields of Kingsford-Smith and would foresee thousands of great birds landing there, nor that Joseph of the Banks Family would establish a repository (aka suppository) for the whole nation called the Bank of New South Wales to lock away the riches for safekeeping until they could be eliminated through the London Stock Exchange by computers that just said ‘No”. Nor is it known that Queen Victoria, originally pleased to have a state named after her, was not amused when it turned out to be a gigantic mine site.

Long live Victoria the drug-ridden slut that she was and the state that sells itself to any sleeze in a fancy car.