Adelaide-Darwin Rail Link

How anyone can knock an addition to the national infrastructure such as the new Adelaide-Darwin 3000 km rail link offers is beyond me. The link has been a long time coming, promised by politicians for 150 years, it is now a reality and the country’s export/import and defence ability is greatly adhanced. Chris Corrigan from Patricks talks about the link having a return equivalent to a tick’s testicles and Tim Fischer rightly replies; some tick, some testicles. Corrigan is a bean counting profit and loss motivated buisness man and would view any new project from a pure commercial view. Fischer, a politician and one time Deputy PM views such infrastructure from a national viewpoint. The potential to open up trade between Australia, specifically Adelaide and Darwin, and our near norther neighbours is huge. Who gives a damn if it doesn’t show a profit for five or even ten years. In one step it alters the logistics of trade enourmously. Don’t think of the link as a 3000 km rail link between two Australian cities. It is clearly much more than that. It is in fact the bottom end of a rail-sea link between Australia and all of our trading partners. Those long established partners; those being developed and those who have yet to sign up. Defence is well served as well by the new link. When the Leopard tanks first come onto the ADF’s inventory, visionaries wanted to bring them north so Infantry (all situated in the North) and the tanks (all situated in the south) could get together for training. Too hard. The rail link between Victoria and Queensland couldn’t carry them. Rail tunnels alone prevented movement of tanks. This abysmal state of affairs has been rectified but the lesson always stayed with me. National Transport infrastructure should always be placed against a military template of needs during the planning stages. I can recall in my last days in the Army commanding 100 vehicle convoys to Darwin as the ADF come to grips with the obvious need for a defence presence in the Territory. The logistics of such moves were horrendous on both vehicles and men and the trip could take up to 14 days while we waited for the slowest vehicle. Now they can all travell at the same speed, on flatbed rolling stock-overnight Corrigan and his bean-counting type need to lift their thinking beyond ticks testicles and think on a national and global scale. The completion of the rail link certainly ranks as one of the country’s great engineering feats. It involved the laying of 2.9 million tonnes of ballast, 2 million sleepers, 140,000 tonnes of rail and 8 million sleeper fastenings across its length. Perhaps the only comparable rail project being undertaken on this scale, albeit under vastly different conditions, is an 1100-kilometre line being built from Qinghai to Lhasa on the Tibetan plateau. The link was completed in two years and after 150 years of promises from various Prime Ministers I am pleased to get up the nose of the Howard Haters by pointing out John Howard made it possible by supporting the project with 150 million dollars and talking it up so private enterprise entered the game.