Memo 15 · Water · Cities
The Desalination Trap
Why east-coast desal capex is building the wrong solution.
Read →200 corridor towns. 11 new intersection cities. Inland Australia opened to ordinary families — and housing supply expanded where land is cheap, rather than bid against itself in five coastal cities.
Australia has a housing shortage it is not closing. The National Housing Accord set 1.2 million homes in five years; the National Housing Supply and Affordability Council expects about 938,000, and its own forecast has the target reached around September 2030 rather than June 2029. By March 2026 the country was some 112,000 completions behind the pace required. Meanwhile the rental vacancy rate sits near 1 per cent against a balanced market of 2.5 to 3.5, the share of median household income needed to pay a new lease has reached an all-time high of 33 per cent, and saving a deposit now takes about 11.2 years.
The reason is not that Australia lacks land. It is that almost all of the land people can actually live on is within commuting distance of five coastal cities, because nothing else is reachable. Supply is therefore forced into the most expensive, most constrained, most contested places in the country — and every new dwelling has to be squeezed into a market already bidding against itself.
The corridor changes what counts as commutable. At 600 km/h, towns hundreds of kilometres inland come inside half an hour of a capital, and land that is cheap because nobody could reach it becomes land people can live on. That is supply expansion at a scale planning reform cannot deliver, because it adds new places rather than redividing the existing ones.
On that route the programme builds around 200 corridor towns and eleven intersection cities — modern cities, designed and built as complete places rather than grown as suburbs. Every one arrives with its maglev station, terabit fibre, a compute precinct, a microgrid and its water connected on day one, because the corridor that reaches it carries all of them already.
That is the part Australia has never been able to do. Its newest settlements are edge-of-city subdivisions, laid out lot by lot and waiting decades for the infrastructure to catch up. These are the opposite: planned in full, designed through an international competition, built from local materials, powered and watered from the network, and net zero from the day they open. The sections below set out how such a city works, and the case for and against the current path.
The corridor does not only connect the cities we have — it builds the ones we need. Each corridor town is self-sustaining, renewable-powered, agrivoltaic and net zero from day one, and designed through a global competition to be genuinely beautiful: towns Australians could live in for a thousand years, scaling from 500 to 100,000 people, and designed to a target rent of $150 a week from the day the doors open — achievable because the land is cheap, the power is generated on site and the town is built as one programme rather than lot by lot.
Every corridor town is designed through a global competition — the brief: self-sustaining, community-centred, suited to its climate and country, built from local materials, expandable from 500 to 100,000 people, and genuinely beautiful. Australian architects, planners and Indigenous custodians sit on every brief and every jury.
Built to a standard, not a budget offcutThese are not heritage villages or eco-retreats. They are contemporary cities: mid-rise and walkable rather than sprawling, with the services people actually need inside a short walk — school, clinic, sport, shops, workplaces — and the long trips handled by a maglev station rather than a second car. The architecture is chosen on merit through an open international competition, judged with Australian architects, planners and Indigenous custodians on every jury, and briefed to suit its own climate and country rather than repeat a template.
The systems underneath are the modern part. A town microgrid balancing rooftop and agrivoltaic generation against storage in real time; terabit fibre with satellite redundancy and a compute precinct, so the work that can be done anywhere can be done here; water metered, recycled and reused rather than run to waste; EV-first internal transport with no petrol stations and no diesel noise; and buildings whose envelope removes the load before a watt is drawn. Every one of those is available today. What has been missing is a place to install them all at once, in a settlement designed around them from the start.
Self-sustaining by designPower from the corridor HVDC spine and a town agrivoltaic microgrid; water from the pipeline, rainwater and greywater recycling; food from agrivoltaic farms, hydroponics, aquaculture and orchards; buildings from hempcrete, rammed earth, local stone and managed timber. The supply chain is the town itself — when the world stops, the town keeps running.
Agrivoltaics — food and power on the same landSolar panels raised over farmland: power generated above, crops grown below in partial shade, needing less water. With eight to nine peak-sun hours in the interior, every hectare does two jobs and yields more combined than either use alone.
Net zero from day oneThe building envelope eliminates load before a watt is drawn — earth-sheltered, passive-solar, deep-eaved. What remains is met by the corridor spine, town solar, battery storage and pumped hydro where the terrain allows. Power cost to residents is effectively zero, and surplus sold back to the corridor grid earns the town revenue from day one.
Hemp — the building materialHempcrete is carbon-negative, insulating, fire-resistant, and improves with age. Grown along the corridor and processed in town, the same crop yields fibre for textiles, seed for food and oil, and composites for panels and furniture — the crop that builds the town, feeds it and clothes it.
Maglev from Stage 1The maglev station is built at Stage 1, not promised for later. Every corridor town is connected at 500 km/h — Roma to Brisbane in about 45 minutes, Broken Hill to Sydney in about an hour, any town to its nearest capital in under two hours. Within the town, transport is EV-first: no petrol stations, no diesel noise.
Tech, knowledge and jobsEvery town has terabit fibre, satellite redundancy and a compute precinct, so remote-first knowledge work is as viable inland as in the capitals — alongside research precincts in agrivoltaics, hempcrete, autonomous logistics, sovereign AI and aerospace. And there is work at every skill level and every stage of life, never more than fifteen minutes away, from construction and agriculture to hospitality, manufacturing and PhD-level research.
The town lakeEvery corridor town has a permanent lake — water storage, evaporative cooling, recreation, biodiversity, and the visual and social heart of the town, filled and maintained from the corridor pipeline. The lake is the town square.
Full policy: Community Towns — Sunshine Australia Party.
Cons: the existing system and current trajectory. Pros: the integrated MMA corridor programme.
Existing capital city infrastructure is already strained. Adding the equivalent of an Adelaide to each of Sydney and Melbourne over 30 years, on existing infrastructure, produces predictable outcomes: housing crisis, transport overload, services failure.
Decades of housing assistance, first-home buyer schemes and stamp duty reform have not moved the price-to-income ratio. On PropTrack’s measure the share of median-income households able to afford the median home nationally has fallen to about 14 per cent, from 43 per cent three years earlier, and to about 10 per cent in Sydney. Demand-side levers do not add dwellings.
Without genuinely commutable regional access, families cannot choose regional living without sacrificing employment. Inland Australia therefore remains uninvited to absorb metropolitan population growth.
Regional centres lose population, services, schools, and hospitals while coastal capitals overflow. The structural decline of inland Australia has been a one-way trend for forty years.
Australia has no integrated national policy for where new cities should be located, how they should be planned, or how their infrastructure should be funded. New towns are not built; suburban sprawl continues at the edge of existing capitals.
Despite traditional ownership of significant portions of Australia, Indigenous Australians remain economically underrepresented. No infrastructure programme of national scale has been built with Indigenous co-design and royalty participation at its core.
Genuinely new viable settlements along the corridor - not suburban sprawl but planned, infrastructure-complete inland communities. Housing supply expands by adding new geography, not by stacking taller on existing geography.
30-minute journeys from Sydney CBD to Newcastle, Goulburn, and the Hunter Valley. Regional living becomes a genuine choice without sacrificing employment access. Decentralisation that finally works because the transport actually works.
Sydney and Melbourne population pressure reduces as new regional alternatives become viable. Existing infrastructure, housing, and services in capital cities stop falling further behind.
University and TAFE campuses, regional hospitals, and specialist services planned into corridor cities from inception rather than retrofitted under development pressure.
The corridor passes through traditional country across the continent. Partnership creates the largest single economic uplift opportunity for Traditional Owners in Australian history - royalty arrangements, employment, planning co-design, and new-town economic stakes.
Sport, arts, public space, and community facilities planned into new intersection cities deliberately rather than added incrementally under development pressure.
Programme-wide ROI summary → · Memo 19 (cost) · Memo 20 (returns) · Memo 21 (counterfactual)