Scott Morrison has had another green brainwave – spend a zillion dollars to build Australia’s electric/hydrogen highway.
Naturally, this ‘Fuelish Policy’ will be supported and accelerated by the Greens/ALP coalition. They all need to study the history of transport in Australia.
Soon after the First Fleet landed, explorers, prospectors, and settlers headed inland seeking grasslands, timber, and minerals.
Often they followed ancient aboriginal trade routes to discover the best waterholes, river crossings, and gaps in the ranges.
No governments surveyed their routes, graded their roads, or established stores of hay, grain, water, and billy tea along the tracks to recharge their horses, donkeys, bullocks, passengers, and drivers.
Feeling left out of this exuberant private road creation, financed mainly by gold, copper, wool, and butter, colonial governments rushed to join the steam railway revolution then sweeping the world.
Enterprising Americans opened their Transcontinental Railway in the 1860s, crossing 12 states with one rail gauge to link Atlantic and Pacific America.
In Australia, private companies started building lines in the 1830s, but instead of standing aside to let it happen as America did, parochial Australian politicians and their friends saddled us with three main railway gauges – ‘Narrow’ in Queensland, ‘Standard’ in New South Wales and ‘Broad’ in Victoria.
All were powered by hydrocarbons – coal, wood, oil, diesel/electric, and coal-powered electric.
Then governments allowed/encouraged unions to gain control of the railways, so service declined, payrolls and costs rose, and profits evaporated.
Besides this planned chaos in Australian railways, one private entrepreneur, Freeman Cobb, established his Cobb and Co. Coach Service from Melbourne to the goldfields in 1854, doing it in half the time taken by its competitors.
No bureaucrats set their routes or approved their plans. Cobb’s main plan was
‘Follow the Gold.’
No government established his horse refueling stations and no coach line ended at a state border.
By the 1870s, Cobb and Co. covered over 11,000 km (6,835 mi) of routes from Cooktown to Southern Victoria, with fresh horses and fuel for drivers, passengers, and horses every 20 km (12.4 mi) or so.
Then the Model T Ford and the internal combustion engine ended the coach era (and the first electric-car era).
No bureaucrats planned or subsidized the establishment of the refueling stations for the petrol- and kerosene-driven cars, utilities, trucks, and tractors that followed the Model T.
Meanwhile, Australian drovers moved the stock up and down the great stock routes, trying to follow the storms that refreshed their grass-powered refueling stations. No bureaucrat planned their business.
But slowly, without political plans or subsidies, diesel trucks and road trains replaced most drovers by providing a quicker service less dependent on the weather. Cities grew as food supplies improved.
But today’s politicians want to force an electric/hydrogen road revolution, casually brushing aside questions as to who will establish the charging-fueling stations and where the reliable energy will come from when diesel, gas, and coal are heavily taxed and nuclear energy is banned.
Electric cars should reduce suburban noise and improve city air quality, but users should fund their own recharging centers, and all road users should contribute fairly to the costs of road building and maintenance.
But a political rush job to abandon coal and petroleum fuels – together with all their engines, generators, and supply chains – would be a mammoth and high-risk undertaking.
To combine this with the task of planning, funding, and building a new transport network based on intermittent green energy, electric engines, batteries, and hydrogen is just a green fantasy.
This LNP Dreamtime electric/hydrogen highway is destined to become the largest-ever green flop in our net-zero era.
Its foolishness and waste will far exceed the colonial rail gauge mess, the subsidized wind/solar mania, and the ALP ‘pink batts’ scheme.
And, if the ALP/Green Coalition wins the next election, this energy disaster will visit us sooner.
Viv Forbes has laid out a short, accurate and concise history of Australian transportation. Not mentioned when it comes to Government operations: the postal, telephone and telegraph – all government. The education services – state governments. Taxes: Commonwealth/Federal and States, and land taxes at a Shire/City level.
The last time I had anything to do with it (Queensland, 1962), there were five different sales tax rates, dependent on what was being sold, where it was made, and what it was made of. (The VAT – “Value Added Tax” came later.)
In Australia, Government is the Master, not the Servant.
Graham, you are right and I think it’s because we don’t want to think for ourselves today. We have become seduced by the every expanding bureaucracy into believing they can do it all for us. The problem with that of course, is the end result. It is never what we imagined nor is it ever good and that needs fixing, which means we need more public servants to do that and to keep us safe? What a joke we have become..!!
Some people are way too deranged to Be Allowed Outside much less take their ideas as serious