Why Doesn't Australia Have High Speed Rail?

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]It's 1984. A CSIRO scientist named Paul Wild walks into the Hawke government with a proposal. Build a high-speed rail line from Melbourne to Sydney using French TGV technology. Cost estimate, two and a half billion dollars. Revenue projections, healthy.

[00:00:18]The proposal gets serious attention, serious media coverage, and serious private interest. Then the Bureau of Transport Economics takes a closer look.

[00:00:27]They find the construction cost has been underestimated by 60%. The minister kills it. Wild's proposal is dead.

[00:00:35]Fast forward to 1990. A private consortium called Very Fast Train Associates releases the results of a major feasibility study.

[00:00:43]A dedicated inland corridor, Melbourne to Sydney to Canberra, speeds up to 350 km/h. Six and a half billion dollars to build. They've already done the route planning. They've got international engineering partners.

[00:00:57]It's arguably the most detailed EHSR proposal Australia has ever seen.

[00:01:02]It gets killed, too.

[00:01:04]Environmental concerns, financing questions, political appetite, zero.

[00:01:09]Then 2001.

[00:01:11]Then 2011. Then 2013.

[00:01:14]Anthony Albanese, as infrastructure minister, releases the phase two high-speed rail study.

[00:01:21]Over 1,600 km of new track.

[00:01:24]Brisbane to Melbourne in under eight hours, costs in the 60 to 100 billion range. BCR just above one. The study sits on the shelf. Every decade, a study. Every decade, nothing.

[00:01:38]The question isn't just why it keeps failing. The question is whether this time, right now in 2026, is actually different. And the answer is genuinely complicated. To understand why high-speed rail keeps dying in Australia, you have to understand how we assess infrastructure.

[00:01:56]The standard tool is a benefit cost ratio.

[00:01:59]You add up all the economic benefits, travel time savings, productivity gains, reduced road congestion, emissions reductions, and you divide by the total cost.

[00:02:10]A ratio above one means benefits outweigh costs. Below one, the opposite.

[00:02:17]For most of Australia's HSR studies, the BCR has hovered just above or just below one, depending on what assumptions you plug in.

[00:02:27]The 2013 phase two study came in at 1.1 using a 7% discount rate.

[00:02:33]That sounds positive.

[00:02:35]But 1.1 is dangerously close to the margin.

[00:02:39]Change a few assumptions and it flips.

[00:02:41]Now look at what the latest business case shows.

[00:02:45]In December 2024, the High-Speed Rail Authority handed the government its business case for stage one, Sydney to Newcastle.

[00:02:54]Infrastructure Australia released its assessment in November 2025.

[00:02:58]The findings are striking.

[00:03:00]The BCR on conservative assumptions is 0.2 at a 7% discount rate.

[00:03:07].2 That means for every dollar spent, you're getting 20 cents back in quantified benefits.

[00:03:13]Even at a 4% discount rate, which is more generous, it's 0.5.

[00:03:20]Those are brutal numbers.

[00:03:22]Infrastructure Australia was blunt.

[00:03:25]It is currently not possible to make a confident assessment of the BCR because the cost estimate is based on design that is only 10 to 15% mature.

[00:03:34]The capital cost, estimated at 93 billion dollars in delivery cost, was actually redacted from the public version of the business case when it was published in February 2026.

[00:03:46]So why did the government move forward anyway?

[00:03:49]Because the BCR, as calculated, captures only a fraction of what this project is supposed to do.

[00:03:56]Infrastructure Australia itself acknowledged that the figures likely understate benefits from network resilience, freight productivity freed up on existing lines, and land use transformation around new stations.

[00:04:08]And here's the thing that changes the conversation entirely.

[00:04:12]The government isn't framing this primarily as a transport project. It's framing it as a housing policy, an economic development strategy, and a regional growth engine.

[00:04:23]The business case projects $250 billion in economic activity by 2086.

[00:04:30]99,000 jobs.

[00:04:32]160,000 new households in the Hunter region.

[00:04:36]Whether you believe those numbers is a different question.

[00:04:39]But they explain why the government approved the next phase in February 2026.

[00:04:45]A 2-year development phase backed by $660 million to refine the design, lock the corridor, progress environmental approvals, and get the project construction ready by around 2027.

[00:04:58]Around Here's something that almost never gets mentioned in media coverage of Australian HSR, but it might be the most important single factor in the whole debate.

[00:05:07]Land.

[00:05:08]Building high-speed rail requires a dedicated corridor, a strip of land wide enough for two tracks with geometry that allows trains to run at 250 to 320 km/h.

[00:05:21]No sharp curves, no level crossings, mostly straight with gentle grades.

[00:05:28]In urban areas, that corridor has to go underground, and tunneling is extraordinarily expensive.

[00:05:35]The Sydney to Newcastle proposal involves approximately 115 km of tunneling.

[00:05:41]That alone is a significant driver of the $93 billion price tag. But here's the long-term problem.

[00:05:47]Every year that passes without locking in a surface corridor outside the cities, that land gets developed.

[00:05:53]Houses, industrial estates, shopping centers, all of which would need to be acquired and demolished at massive cost or avoided through additional tunneling.

[00:06:04]The 2013 study explicitly flagged this.

[00:06:07]Acquire the corridor now or face dramatically higher costs later.

[00:06:12]The High Speed Rail Authority is doing exactly that on the Sydney-Newcastle leg.

[00:06:18]Geotechnical drilling started in August 2024.

[00:06:22]Boreholes along the Central Coast began in late 2024. The alignment is being mapped. The corridor is being protected.

[00:06:29]But here's the rub.

[00:06:31]Sydney to Newcastle was always the hardest and most expensive segment of any East Coast network. It involves the Hawkesbury River crossing, the sandstone plateau of the Central Coast, and the need to reach deep into both CBDs underground.

[00:06:45]Fast Track Australia, an advocacy group that has done detailed independent analysis, has pointed out that by choosing to build the most geologically difficult section first, the HSRA is taking a high-stakes gamble.

[00:06:59]If stage one blows out in cost or proves undeliverable, it poisons the political will for everything south to Melbourne and north to Brisbane.

[00:07:08]The counter-argument from the government is that you have to start somewhere.

[00:07:12]And Sydney-Newcastle is the country's busiest regional corridor, carrying 15 million passengers a year on existing rail with capacity running out by the 2030s.

[00:07:22]Both of these things are true simultaneously. That's what makes this complicated.

[00:07:26]Let me steelman the skeptics because they deserve more credit than they usually get.

[00:07:31]Australia is not Europe. Australia is not Japan.

[00:07:36]The comparison to the Shinkansen or the TGV gets made constantly and it constantly misses the point.

[00:07:43]Japan's HSR network works because Japan has the densest urban corridor in the developed world. The Tokyo-Osaka axis has over 80 million people living within a narrow strip of about 500 km.

[00:07:56]Density does the work. Ridership is enormous. Fares pay the operational costs, and in some cases have historically contributed to capital.

[00:08:05]France's TGV was partly a political industrial project, a way to explore French engineering capability and build domestic sovereign capacity in a strategic technology.

[00:08:16]The BCR analysis was secondary to the strategic rationale.

[00:08:20]Australia's East Coast has Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Canberra.

[00:08:25]Combined population of about 12 million across a corridor of almost 2,000 km.

[00:08:31]Dispersed, car-dependent, served by a domestic aviation network that is already cheap, fast, and frequent.

[00:08:39]Sydney to Melbourne is one of the busiest air corridors in the world, fifth busiest as of 2025.

[00:08:47]But fares on that route regularly sit below $200 return.

[00:08:51]A high-speed rail ticket competing on that corridor would need to be price competitive while also recovering costs on a line that cost tens of billions to build.

[00:09:00]That is a fundamentally different economics problem from Tokyo to Osaka.

[00:09:05]There's also a geography problem that rarely gets adequately acknowledged.

[00:09:09]Between Sydney and Melbourne, you have to cross the Great Dividing Range.

[00:09:13]There's a reason the existing rail line meanders inland through Albury.

[00:09:17]The coastal route is mountainous.

[00:09:20]An HSR line through the ranges would require extensive tunneling, adding cost.

[00:09:26]Inland, you're routing through areas of extremely low population density, which suppresses ridership.

[00:09:33]And then there's the political economy problem.

[00:09:36]High-speed rail in Australia has a funding model problem that no study has ever satisfactorily resolved.

[00:09:42]The 2013 phase two study acknowledged that government would need to fund 86% of capital costs, around $98 billion in 2012 figures, with fares contributing only a fraction.

[00:09:56]No private financier will fund a project with returns that uncertain over a time frame that long.

[00:10:02]And Australian governments, state and federal, are operating in an environment of constrained budgets and competing priorities.

[00:10:11]Hospitals, schools, social housing, defense.

[00:10:15]None of this means HSR is wrong, but it does mean that anyone telling you it's obviously the right call is not engaging seriously with the problem.

[00:10:25]Here's where I land on this.

[00:10:27]The Sydney to Newcastle business case, as currently structured, has a BCR that is very hard to defend in isolation.

[00:10:36]Infrastructure Australia was honest about that, but Infrastructure Australia also recommended moving forward because the development phase is not a construction commitment. It's a two-year investment in improving cost certainty, refining the alignment, and investigating funding structures.

[00:10:56]That's a reasonable thing to do with $600 million when the alternative is losing the corridor forever.

[00:11:01]The corridor is the key word here.

[00:11:03]If the land between Sydney and Newcastle is not protected now, it will be developed, and once it's developed, that's it. You're looking at another 50 years without any realistic prospect of East Coast HSR.

[00:11:16]Not because the technology doesn't exist, not because there's no demand, but because you couldn't afford to build it through suburbia.

[00:11:24]The government is framing the opening of stage one at around 2039 for Central Coast to Newcastle, 2039 for the Sydney extension.

[00:11:33]That is an extraordinarily long timeline for something that has already been studied for 40 years and it's only stage one.

[00:11:40]Melbourne and Brisbane remain completely unfunded beyond the corridor work. But here's what I think matters for the long run.

[00:11:46]If this development phase produces a credible refined cost figure, a locked alignment and a funding model that can attract state government and potentially private co-investment, then the BCR question becomes less decisive.

[00:12:01]Infrastructure decisions of this scale are always partly political.

[00:12:05]The question is whether the politics and the economics can be aligned at the same moment in time.

[00:12:11]That has never happened in Australia before.

[00:12:14]Whether 2026 is finally the moment when it does.

[00:12:18]I genuinely don't know. But for the first time in 40 years, there is a statutory authority doing real work.

[00:12:24]There is money in the ground in the form of boreholes and there is a political commitment that has survived an election. That's not nothing, but it's also not a train.