Inner Nation Towns

The third of the housing solutions, companion to Memo 7, Rural Communities, and Memo 8, City Communities. Those two capture the supply Australia already has. This one is the grand plan: two hundred new towns across the inner nation, on land that costs almost nothing, and what cheap modern country homes would mean for Australian families.

1. The predicament of scale

The coast is full and the coast is dear. Almost the entire Australian population is pressed into a narrow strip of it, bidding for the same finite land, and the price of that land is the largest single reason a house costs what it costs. Land in the Sydney central business district runs to between $50,000 and $150,000 a square metre; inner Melbourne $10,000 to $30,000; inner Brisbane $8,000 to $20,000. Every housing policy of the last thirty years has been an attempt to make that strip hold more people, and none of them has changed the arithmetic underneath it.

The projections make it worse rather than better. Sydney and Melbourne are each set to absorb between 2.5 and 3 million more people by 2056 — the equivalent of adding an Adelaide to each, on infrastructure that is already strained. Meanwhile inland Australia has been going the other way for forty years, losing population, services, schools and hospitals: towns where the pub closed, the bank left and the school went to two days a week. And Australia has no national settlement policy at all — no position on where new towns should go, how they should be planned, or how their infrastructure should be paid for.

Memos 7 and 8 take the supply that already exists and put it to work. Neither of them adds a square kilometre of ground. This memo is about the ground.

2. The plan: two hundred inner nation towns

Build inland. Two hundred new towns and eleven intersection cities along the Modern Movement Australia corridors, in the inner nation — new places on new ground, not more sprawl at the edge of the old ones. Housing supply expands by adding geography rather than by stacking taller on the geography we have already filled.

The case rests on two things, and they are simple enough to state in a sentence each. The land costs almost nothing — a corridor township sits on a government easement already acquired for the corridor, so a family lives on a thousand square metres for what a coastal family pays for three hundred. The install costs almost nothing extra — power, water, fibre and rail run down the corridor and reach each township site before the town is built, so there is no trunk main extended twenty kilometres and no substation built for one estate. The infrastructure arrives first, which is the reverse of how Australian suburbs are made.

What follows from those two facts is the whole plan:

• They start small and grow to what is needed. A township begins as a settlement of a few hundred people, serviced from day one, and grows with the farming, industry and services around it. The designs scale to 100,000 — a full city with a university and a hospital — but that is a capability held in reserve, not a promise attached to every site.
• They are connected from the start. The corridor carries the train with it, so an inland town is a couple of hours from a capital rather than a day. That single fact is what turns a remote site into a place a family can choose without giving up work.
• The country builds the corridor, not the towns. The Sovereign Build Corporation delivers the connection and establishes the sites; the towns themselves are built over time by states, councils, developers and the people who live in them. The public commitment is the spine, and the towns are what becomes possible once it exists.
• The homes are built here. Founding homes across the two hundred towns run to roughly 1.5 million dwellings. Imported at around $200,000 a home that is a $300 billion bill; manufactured in Australia at around $80,000 a home it is $120 billion — and the difference buys a domestic industry that exists because the programme guaranteed it a decade of orders.
• The supply is at the scale of the problem. The programme estimates the inland cascade at 500,000 to 1,000,000 additional dwellings over twenty years, and coastal capital pressure relieved structurally rather than managed at the margin.
• Nothing is displaced to build it. No demolition, no rezoning fight, no neighbour losing a view. New towns on empty ground are the only form of housing supply that costs somebody else nothing.

What is not in this memo is the sequencing: how each site is staged, in what order the works are let, and to which standards. That is engineering, it belongs to engineers, and the corridor programme documents cited at section 9 carry it. What is in this memo is the plan and what it opens up — because the case for building inland has to be won before the first drawing is worth doing.

3. The corridors, and what they carry

None of this works without the corridors, and the corridors are the actual proposal — the towns are what becomes possible once they exist. Six of them, roughly 23,000 kilometres in total, cut across the continent rather than around its rim (the routes and staging are set out in the MMA programme’s The Plan and Phase Maps):

• Corridor 1 — Brisbane to Perth, about 4,000 km. The great east–west line and the first build: inland Queensland through Roma, Charleville and Longreach, south through Bourke, Wilcannia, Broken Hill and Mildura, then across South Australia to the Western Australian border and on to Perth.
• Corridor 2 — Darwin to Port Augusta, about 2,400 km. The north–south spine through the centre.
• Corridor 3 — Gulf Coast to Adelaide, about 2,500 km.
• Corridor 4 — Port Hedland to Mackay, about 3,200 km, running roughly along the twentieth parallel — the northern crossing.
• Corridor 5 — Broome to Esperance, about 1,800 km, down the western side.
• Corridor 6 — Mount Isa to Perth, about 2,700 km.

What makes them different from a railway or a transmission line is that they are one easement carrying everything at once. Passenger rail, freight, high-voltage transmission, water, fibre and road run together down the same reserved ground, surveyed once, acquired once and built once. That is the entire economic argument: the marginal cost of adding a service to a corridor already being built is a fraction of the cost of building that service on its own alignment, and every one of them needs the same thing — a straight, flat, cheap, uncontested line across the country.

For the towns it means the connection is not a later project. A township site sits on the corridor, so it has power from the transmission spine, water from the pipeline, a fibre connection, a freight line for whatever it produces and a passenger service to the capitals — all present before the first house is built. The plan places a township roughly every hundred kilometres along the route, which on the east–west corridor alone is thirty-five to forty-three sites of the two hundred nationally, with the eleven intersection cities where corridors cross.

And the linking matters as much as the lines. Six corridors crossing the interior make a network, not a set of spurs: a town on one of them reaches the ports on both coasts, the northern harbours and the southern capitals over the same infrastructure. Regional Australia stops being a set of dead ends hanging off the coastal cities and becomes connected ground in its own right — which is the condition every previous attempt at decentralisation was missing.

4. The water from the north

None of this is possible without water, and Australia has plenty of it in the wrong place. The northern monsoon drops roughly 290,000 gigalitres of fresh water a year into the Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria. Two-thirds of the continent’s rainfall runs off to the sea unused. The Lake Eyre Basin alone drains 1.14 million square kilometres of it into a salt lake that evaporates the lot. At the same time the south and the interior run dry, the Murray–Darling is over-allocated and structurally declining, and farming communities live one drought from the end.

So the corridor carries the water south and west from the northern catchments, pumped by power generated along the same spine — the programme proposes capturing up to 30,000 gigalitres a year of what is currently lost, and its Water pillar carries the scheme. Water is one of the services that reaches every township site before the town is built — not promised for a later funding round. Three things follow from that, and they are the reason the towns work at all.

The town gets water from day one. A tap-off at each site supplies the houses, and it fills a permanent lake at the centre of the town — storage, cooling, recreation, birdlife, and a town square that happens to be water. In a hot interior a lake is not decoration. It is the difference between a place people endure and a place they choose to live.

The farmland comes with it. Every hundred kilometres: a township, a tap-off and an irrigation district. Red soil that has waited two centuries for water, in country that has never been farmed because there was nothing to farm it with — new land, new crops, new markets, and towns full of people working them — the programme puts the area brought into production at some 13.4 million hectares (its Farming pillar). This takes nothing from anybody. It opens what was always there, waiting for water that currently runs into the sea.

And the rivers get relief. As inland farms draw on pipeline water, the pressure on the Murray–Darling falls. The southern rivers recover because northern water arrives, rather than because somebody’s allocation is taken away — which is the only version of Murray–Darling reform that does not set one community against another.

Capture volumes, environmental flows and Traditional Owner water rights are settled by the corridor water studies and by negotiation, not by this memo. What is stated here is the plan: the water is in the north, the need is in the south and the interior, and the corridor is what carries one to the other.

5. What these towns could be

A town built on empty ground with its services already in place can be almost anything — the MMA Cities pillar sets out the design brief in full. None of what follows is prescribed here — it is the range of what becomes possible when a settlement is designed whole instead of accreted over a century, and it is the reason to be ambitious about the brief rather than merely efficient.

• Net zero from the day it opens, because the building envelope, the orientation and the energy supply are settled together rather than retrofitted — with the power cost to residents approaching nothing and surplus generation sold back down the corridor.
• Food and power from the same ground. Agrivoltaics — panels raised over farmland, crops in the partial shade below using less water — makes every hectare do two jobs, on eight to nine peak-sun hours a day in the interior.
• Built from what is around it. Hempcrete, rammed earth, local stone and managed timber: materials that can be grown or quarried along the corridor and processed in town, so the town builds itself and the crop that houses it also feeds and clothes it.
• Designed to be beautiful. There is no reason a new Australian town should be ugly. A global design competition for each town, with Australian architects, planners and Indigenous custodians on every brief and every jury, is a cheap way to buy a place people will still want to live in a century from now.
• Work that does not require a city. Terabit fibre and a compute precinct make knowledge work as viable inland as in a capital, alongside the farming, manufacturing, construction and services the town runs on — work at every skill level, minutes from home.
• Quiet and clean by design. Electric-first transport, no through-freight down the main street, and a town small enough to walk before it is large enough to need anything else.

Some towns will take all of that and some will take very little of it. The point of stating the possibilities is that they are only available at the start — a town retrofits at ten times the cost of a town designed correctly, and Australia is about to have two hundred chances to design correctly.

6. What cheap country homes would bring

The plan is worth arguing on infrastructure grounds. It is worth far more on family grounds, and that is the case this memo makes.

A family stops paying rent it cannot afford. Modelled against a Sydney household, $800 a week in rent plus power plus commuting comes to something like $1,500 a week. In a corridor town the same household pays $150 a week, with power from the town supply and no commute, because home and work are in the same place. The modelled saving is $70,000 a year, and $90,000 in the first year with the housing establishment grant. For most Australian families there is no other policy on offer that moves a number of that size.

And it ends with the house owned. Rent runs at $150 to $200 a week with the payments counting toward purchase, and a target price of $150,000 to $250,000 including land. That is a mortgage a single ordinary income can carry, on a house the family owns outright at the end of it — and it is only reachable because the land underneath is near-free. What the coastal market cannot deliver at any price, cheap ground delivers as a matter of arithmetic.

What that buys is not just cheaper — it is better. Space, quiet, clean air, nature at the edge of the street, neighbours who know each other, and children who can play outside. Work within fifteen minutes of home. These are the things Australians say they want when asked, and the things the coastal cities have been quietly pricing out of reach of ordinary earners for a generation.

Towns for families, and communities inside them. The rural communities of Memo 7 and the shared-floor communities of Memo 8 both belong inside these towns as well as outside them — a corridor town can carry a land lease community on its edge and a shared building at its centre, so a young household, a single parent, an older couple and a family on a full block all have somewhere in the same place. A town that only has one kind of housing only has one kind of household.

The towns that already exist get the same lift. The corridor does not only create new places; it reaches the ones that have been hollowed out. Where a spine passes near an existing town, that town gets the connection, the services and the traffic it lost — and the country stops paying, year after year, for the slow collapse of regional Australia.

And a nation gets its interior back. Two hundred towns filling out over decades is millions of Australians living inland, work distributed across the continent instead of concentrated on its rim, and food, energy and industry produced where the land and the sun are. The best places to live in Australia are country towns. The plan is to build more of them.

7. What would have to change

This part of the series asks for decisions, not amendments.

• A national settlement policy. A Commonwealth position on where new towns and cities go, how they are planned and how their infrastructure is funded — the instrument Australia has never had.
• The corridor decision. Adoption of the corridor programme and establishment of the Sovereign Build Corporation to deliver it.
• Alignment protection now. Corridor routes and township sites identified and protected before they are priced. Reserving the land early is the cheapest act in the entire programme.
• Crown land on rent-to-buy terms. The legal machinery to transfer township lots to occupants through rent-to-buy, so that $150 a week ends in ownership rather than in permanent tenancy.

None of it displaces the near-term work. The five state instruments and two Commonwealth changes of Memo 7, and the eleven changes of Memo 8, stand on their own and should proceed whether or not a corridor is ever cut.

8. Summary

Australia is expensive to live in because Australians all live in the same narrow place. Parts 1 and 2 of these housing solutions use that place better, and they can be legislated now. Part 3 is the answer to why it is narrow at all: build inland, on land that costs almost nothing, serviced by a corridor that arrives before the town does.

Two hundred towns, starting small, growing to what each region needs, with modern homes an ordinary family can rent for $150 a week and own outright in time. The engineering will be settled by engineers. The question in front of the country is the one before that — whether it is willing to build new places worth living in, instead of asking the same coastal strip to hold everybody.

9. Sources

1. Modern Movement Australia, Cities pillar — 200 corridor towns and 11 new intersection cities; townships scaling from a few hundred people to 100,000; rent of $150 a week from opening; the commitment to self-sustaining, net zero, globally designed towns; and the corridor-first sequencing of power, water, transport and fibre. Programme design material, stated throughout this memo as design targets rather than measurements. Cited in sections 1, 2, 5 and 6.
2. Sovereign Australia Party, Federal Platform — corridor township land cost at near zero on the government-owned easement against Sydney CBD land at $50,000 to $150,000 a square metre, inner Melbourne $10,000 to $30,000 and inner Brisbane $8,000 to $20,000; a corridor family on 1,000 square metres at $150 a week against a Sydney family on 300 square metres; the modelled household comparison of about $1,500 a week in Sydney against $150 in a corridor town, giving $70,000 a year and $90,000 in year one with the $20,000 housing establishment grant; rent of $150 to $200 a week counting toward a purchase price of $150,000 to $250,000; 1.5 million founding homes at approximately $80,000 domestically manufactured against $200,000 imported; township site establishment at $15 to $20 million each; and the corridor towns commitment to communities within 100 kilometres of a spine. Programme design figures and modelled comparisons. Cited in sections 1, 2, 5 and 6.
3. Modern Movement Australia, Memo 20 — SBC Return on Investment, sections 4.5, 6.1 and 6.3 — the inland housing supply cascade estimated at 500,000 to 1,000,000 additional dwellings over twenty years. A programme estimate, not an official forecast. Cited in sections 2 and 3.
4. Modern Movement Australia, Memo 19 — SBC Cost Breakdown and Memo 21 — Without SBC — corridor infrastructure capital costs, and the counterfactual estimate of continuing federal and state housing expenditure without a structural intervention. Referenced for where the costings sit; no figures drawn into this memo. Cited in sections 2 and 3.
5. State and Commonwealth population projections as compiled on the Modern Movement Australia Cities pillar — Sydney and Melbourne each projected to absorb 2.5 to 3 million additional people by 2056. Cited in section 1.
6. Sovereign Australia Party, The Housing Predicament (Memo 6), Rural Communities (Memo 7) and City Communities (Memo 8) — the standing of the housing programme, and the two near-term solutions that capture existing rural and city supply under existing governments. Cited in sections 1, 6 and 7.
7. Sovereign Build Corporation corridor definitions and route maps, and Modern Movement Australia, The Plan and Phase Maps — the six corridors and their approximate lengths (Brisbane–Perth ~4,000 km; Darwin–Port Augusta ~2,400 km; Gulf Coast–Adelaide ~2,500 km; Port Hedland–Mackay ~3,200 km; Broome–Esperance ~1,800 km; Mount Isa–Perth ~2,700 km) totalling approximately 23,200 km; the single multimodal easement carrying passenger rail, freight, transmission, water, fibre and road; the east–west first-build route through Roma, Charleville, Longreach, Bourke, Wilcannia, Broken Hill and Mildura; and a township approximately every 100 kilometres, giving 35 to 43 sites on that corridor. High-level plan; detailed route studies to follow. Cited in section 3.
8. Modern Movement Australia, Water pillar, Farming pillar, and Sovereign Australia Party, Federal Platform — the northern monsoon delivering approximately 290,000 gigalitres a year to the Timor Sea and Gulf of Carpentaria; approximately two-thirds of Australian rainfall running to the sea unused; the Lake Eyre Basin draining 1.14 million square kilometres into a salt lake that evaporates it; the fresh water pipeline from northern catchments pumped by corridor power, with capture of up to 30,000 gigalitres a year and approximately 13.4 million hectares brought into production; a tap-off and irrigation district at each township site approximately every 100 kilometres; and reduced pressure on the over-allocated Murray–Darling as inland farms draw on pipeline water. Programme design material; capture volumes, environmental flows and Traditional Owner water rights are subject to the corridor water studies. Cited in section 4.