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our government has got the idea that, like Battleships, they want to build a fast train system that is bound to be both out of date and inferior to the possible transport alternative twenty or thirty years in the future.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..