Modern Movement Australia — Building Australia for our children and their children

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What this is, in five questions.

What is it?

One elevated corridor across the continent, carrying six things in the same trench: fast passenger rail, electric freight rail, high-voltage electricity, water, gas and fibre. Build the route once and every service shares the cost of it.

That is the whole idea. Everything else on this site follows from it.

Why build it?

Because six national problems have the same cause — a country the size of Europe with no continental network, so almost everything is trucked, flown, or imported.

Fuel. About 90 per cent of refined fuel is imported, with roughly 30 days held onshore.
Power prices. Generation is only about a third of a household bill — transmission and distribution are most of the rest, so cheaper generation alone never reaches the customer.
Renewable power, unbuilt. Australia has the best combined solar and wind resource of any developed economy, and the interior gets around 2,400–2,800 kilowatt-hours per square metre a year against 1,600–1,800 on the coast. What is missing is the transmission to move it, which is the single hardest thing to build — and the corridor carries it in an easement already being cut.
Nothing to sell but raw material. The country exports coal, gas and ore and buys back the finished product. Power sent through the subsea corridors is an export that never depletes, and every megawatt-hour of it displaces coal or gas burned by a neighbour.
Housing. Australians are packed into five coastal cities because nowhere else is reachable.
Water. The north floods every wet season while the south buys desalinated water.
Industry. Manufacturing has fallen from 14 per cent of the economy to under 5.
Defence. A country that cannot fuel, feed and move itself cannot defend itself.

Who builds it, and who owns it?

The Modern Movement Australia — a public builder, owned by the Australian people, in the tradition of the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The corridor and its services stay in Australian hands, and the tolls paid to use them return to the public rather than to foreign infrastructure funds.

What does it cost?

Less than doing nothing. Australia is already committed to roughly $2.7 to $4.4 trillion over twenty years on water, energy, transport and defence, spent separately and connecting nothing. The corridor does the same work on one alignment, and the assets earn afterwards. Funding comes from a mix of Australian and international capital, set out on the Funding page.

Where does it start?

Phase 0 is the Melbourne–Brisbane inland spine, about 2,400 km, built on existing road and rail corridors through Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. It proves the method on the busiest corridor in the country. Phases 1 to 3 then take it across the continent, and seven subsea corridors carry the power and data on into the Asia-Pacific.

A few terms used across this site. MMA — Modern Movement Australia, the public builder. The corridor — the elevated multi-service right of way. Alice Hub — the water and energy storage centre near Alice Springs, at the geographic middle of the country. HVDC — the high-voltage lines that move power efficiently over long distances. Maglev — magnetic levitation trains, about 600 km/h. AUASIA — Australia in Asia, the alternative to AUKUS.

Read the plan in full →

The full list

The benefits, in detail.

Nearly fifty national outcomes from one infrastructure programme. Grouped into six themes.

Energy & Water

Cheap electricity — under 10c/kWh. The target the programme is built to hit, and the figure the policy legislates as a ceiling: consumer power under 10c/kWh, delivered by HVDC transmission, gigawatt-scale corridor solar and the Alice Hub reserve. On the current national pathway CSIRO puts delivered power at 14–15c/kWh before distribution charges — which is the gap this programme exists to close.
Cheap gas — under $10/GJ. Domestic gas at domestic prices, against contract prices near $13.55/GJ today. Northern reserves connected to southern manufacturing and households, ending the export-netback pricing that has closed Australian industrial plants.
HVDC transmission carried on the corridor. 72 GW of high-voltage DC transmission carried on the same elevated structure as the rail and the maglev — no separate easement, no parallel build, the grid finally rebuilt.
Continental electricity grid integrated. Every state grid integrated into a single continental power network. Generation balanced across multiple time zones; surplus exported through Darwin to Asia.
National gas grid integrated. The missing connections completed. Northern strategic gas reserves available to manufacturing and households across the country — one network, not several disconnected fragments.
Water — north to south. Up to 30,000 GL/year continental water transfer from the wet tropics to the Murray–Darling basin. The Bradfield Scheme — proposed in the 1930s — finally made physically possible by corridor solar.
National water security. The agricultural heartland drought-proofed for the first time since federation. Cities and towns connected to a continental water system rather than depending on local rainfall and a single dam.
Pumped hydro — the Alice Hub. 40 GW of pumped hydro at 770 m head south of Alice Springs. About 30 TWh of stored energy — equivalent to a 32-day continental energy reserve. On completion, the largest energy storage system on earth.
Net zero — infrastructure backbone. Electrified freight removes diesel road haul. HVDC connects renewables to load. Desert solar generates at scale. Emissions fall as a consequence of how the network is built, rather than as a separate policy programme.
Reduced fuel imports. Diesel imports fall sharply as electrified freight replaces road haul, and kerosene demand falls as fast passenger rail replaces short-haul aviation. The country’s biggest strategic vulnerability, reduced at the network level.

Transport & Movement

Maglev passenger — 600 km/h. Newcastle to Sydney in 15 minutes, Sydney to Melbourne in 90 minutes, Melbourne to Brisbane in under four hours. Every major Australian city connected by ground transport that beats the plane door-to-door, at fares affordable to ordinary travellers.
Electric freight — diesel road haul replaced. Three electrified freight tracks replacing diesel B-doubles on every major export and import route. Decarbonisation by economics rather than legislation, and heavy truck traffic taken off a thousand kilometres of coastal towns.
Expanded electrified rail network. Phase 0 plus seven spurs covers the populated eastern third of the country. The continental network then extends across the six corridors set out on the Phase Maps — every regional centre with population gets a station.
Electric freight to most Australian ports. Newcastle, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Fremantle, Darwin, Port Hedland, Gladstone, Mackay, Eden — most major commercial ports connected to one national electrified freight network.
Coastal corridor freed. About 1,200 km of coastal rail and highway freed of freight as the trucks migrate inland — driven by economics, not legislation. Taree, Kempsey, Coffs Harbour, Grafton, Lismore: amenity restored.

Economic & Social

Manufacturing renaissance. Sovereign Australian rail mill, seamless tubular mill, continental precast concrete capacity, high-voltage electrical industry. The infrastructure programme funds the manufacturing base; the base outlasts the programme.
AI compute on sovereign power. Compute capacity for the next era — built on power priced to be among the cheapest in the developed world. Australia becomes a place AI workloads come to, not flee from.
Housing affordability. Around 200 new corridor towns and eleven intersection cities. Inland land brought into residential development for the first time. House prices and rents pulled down by supply expansion that finally works at scale.
New inland towns & cities. 200+ new corridor towns and around eleven new intersection cities along the network. Australia’s inland populated for the first time since federation, because the corridor makes inland living viable for ordinary families.
Inland repopulation. Decentralisation that actually works. Coastal capitals relieved of population pressure; corridor towns within about 300 km of a capital reachable in half an hour by maglev. The rural depopulation trend reversed.
Expanded farmland. Continental water transfer enables agricultural expansion across the central north. Land that has been climate-marginal becomes productive. Australia’s food production capacity grows in step with global demand.
GW-scale desert solar. Gigawatt-scale photovoltaic farms in the inland desert corridor sections — uncontested land, no displacement of agriculture, and routed to avoid national parks. The cheapest sovereign electricity generated where there is nothing competing for the ground.
Education infrastructure. University and TAFE campuses built into the corridor cities. Apprenticeship pathways for the new manufacturing base. Research infrastructure spread across the continent rather than concentrated in two capitals.
Healthcare networks. Regional hospitals at the new corridor towns. Specialist services accessible by maglev. Healthcare infrastructure that follows population growth rather than waiting for it.
Cultural infrastructure. Sport, arts, public spaces in the new intersection cities. Community infrastructure built deliberately rather than added incrementally as development pressure forces it.

Strategic & Sovereign

Defence & security backbone. Continental electrified freight gives defence logistics a national movement capability it has never had. Strategic fuel reserves restored, sovereign manufacturing for critical components, national resilience as a property of the network.
AUKUS repositioned for defensive sovereignty. The submarine programme repositioned to deliver mass-produced unmanned coastal defence, dual-use shipbuilding, and Sovereign Defence Manufacturing — same alliance, more durable capability, the country actually defended where it lives. See MMA Memo 18.
Sovereign Defence Manufacturing under MMA umbrella. The same industrial base that produces civilian infrastructure components produces defence components — cables, pipes, naval architecture, composites, electronics, unmanned-system sub-assemblies. MMA and defence demand together justify the manufacturing base that neither could justify alone.
Transport fuel sovereignty. Electrified freight on MMA corridor progressively retires Australia’s ~90% imported-fuel dependency. The shipping-lane vulnerability that no navy can defend is reduced at its source, by removing the demand rather than defending the route. Maglev passenger removes most domestic jet-fuel demand on the same network.
Australia as uniter in the Asian community of nations. Subsea HVDC, fibre, and water connectors bind Australia to its neighbours on the European-Union pattern of integration deep enough that conflict becomes structurally unattractive. Trade and shared infrastructure as the durable form of security.
Strategic fuel & energy reserves. Ninety-day fuel reserve met for the first time. Thirty-two-day continental energy reserve at the Alice Hub. Australia regains the strategic depth that decades of import dependency removed.
Continental space port. A national space port in northern Australia — among the best low-latitude launch geography on Earth, with controlled airspace, low population density, and stable politics. Australia becomes a space-launch nation.
Space manufacturing. Sovereign capability to manufacture satellites, launch vehicles, and space-related components. Built on the same manufacturing base that the programme creates.

The Asian Community of Nations

Regional grid construction industry. Australian shipyards and manufacturers build the cable-laying vessels, pipeline ships, subsea transformers, fibre cable, and structural components that connect the Asia-Pacific grid. The construction is itself a major Australian export — Australia as the regional infrastructure contractor.
HVDC electricity export to the region. Sovereign continental solar generates surplus at scale; HVDC subsea cables to Indonesia, Singapore, and beyond deliver Australian clean power to where it’s needed. Sun Cable and the Australia-Asia PowerLink as the precedent. Revenue per MWh, every hour the cable runs.
AI compute export to the Asia-Pacific. 23 ms to Singapore. Cheap sovereign renewable electricity. ORC heat recovery for cooling. Subsea fibre interconnects. The regional AI compute supplier the Indo-Pacific is looking for.
Manufacturing ore and critical minerals into value-added products. Iron, copper, bauxite, lithium, and rare earths processed and manufactured in Australia under Sovereign Defence Manufacturing — turned into finished steel, transmission line, motors, battery cells, and the components regional partners actually buy back. Value capture stays onshore; the export base shifts from raw ore to manufactured goods on long-duration contracts.
Decarbonising the region by export. Every TWh of Australian renewable electricity exported displaces coal or gas generation in the importing country. Australia exports its emission reductions to the region — among the largest decarbonisation contributions any single country can make.
Water and fibre for selected regional partners. The aqueduct and fibre technology that runs continental Australia can extend to selected regional partners — shared infrastructure as the European-pattern integration.
Two-way gas integration with PNG. PNG gas imports balance Australian exports of power, water, compute, and processed minerals. The relationship runs in both directions — mutual flows create mutual stake, which is what makes integration durable. The same principle the European Union built on.
The European model applied to the Asia-Pacific. Interconnected grids smooth supply, shared infrastructure binds the region in mutual interest, intra-regional conflict becomes structurally unattractive. Australia as builder and convener of the regional infrastructure web — the uniter role in the Asian community of nations.
Renewable export revenue, perpetually. Unlike coal, iron, and LNG, these exports do not deplete. Every cable, every megawatt-hour, every contract renewed — perpetual revenue for Australians as long as the infrastructure runs.

Innovation & Knowledge

Continental observatory network. National astronomical and scientific observatory infrastructure spread along the corridor — leveraging Australia’s exceptional southern-sky astronomy advantage and dark-sky inland geography.
Sovereign cloud & data infrastructure. Sovereign Australian compute and data centres built on cheap continental electricity. Australian data, Australian-owned, Australian-hosted — the strategic capability to keep critical national data on Australian soil.
Indigenous economic sovereignty. The corridor passes through traditional country across the continent. Partnership on that country offers economic uplift for traditional owners on a scale no previous Australian infrastructure programme has carried — through royalty arrangements, employment, and economic development.
University & research corridor. Universities and research institutes spread along the corridor, connected by maglev to each other and to capital-city institutions. The knowledge economy spread across the continent rather than confined to two cities.

The Australia we build, for our children's children.

What this is, in five questions.

What is it?

Why build it?

Who builds it, and who owns it?

What does it cost?

Where does it start?

MMA unites the continent.

One continental method. One global standard. One system to connect the world.

One programme. Eleven outcomes.

Water

Energy

AI & Compute

Passenger

Freight

Farming

Cities

Manufacturing

Defence

AUASIA

Space