Australia to spend millions making its cities smarter

Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal government, which won the federal election last month, has revealed a Smart Cities and Suburbs Program, with the intention of bringing local councils and tech firms to the table.

The $50 million program calls for local councils to implement smart city technology to improve cities and suburbs. Federal funds will back part of the project; private and local funding will pay for the rest.

It will host a series of public-private roundtable sessions next month that attempt to establish contracts between councils and companies.

“The Smart Cities and Suburbs Program is to support clever technology ideas to fix difficult or long standing community issues,” said the Assistant Minister for Cities, Angus Taylor, at the Future Cities Summit. “The most valuable projects will be transformative collaborations between multiple councils and technology industry partners that link closely with future plans for the area.”

The federal government is looking for projects that enhance the security, livability, and sustainability of cities. Projects that look to reduce the local council costs would also be considered, as the Liberal government looks to reduce the budget deficit.

Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has already shown interest in building Internet of Things (IoT) platforms in Australian cities. It launched a trial of its smart sewage platform in Victoria a few months ago, in partnership with Vodafone.

Australia announcement looks familiar

Australia is not the first country to bring cities and companies together. In the U.S., the Department of Transportation (DOT) recently ran a Smart City Challenge, which offered $40 million (plus $10 million from Paul Allen’s Vulcan) to the city with the most compelling manifesto.

Columbus, Ohio won, but many of the finalists like Denver, Colorado and San Francisco, California said that private investment reached over $20 million. Some of the cities plan to continue to the public-private projects, while others have said they plan to be more open to tech experts and firms in the future.

Australia’s government should be hoping for a similar outcome, even if the program isn’t winner takes all.

Hi-speed Aussie railroad could spark new smart cities

Backers of a controversial $151 billion high-speed rail plan claim it will be funded by the creation of eight new Australian smart cities.

As reported by Australian newspaper The Age, long-sought details are finally emerging about a proposed high-speed rail line between Sydney and Melbourne. The proposed railway would cut travel time from the current 12 hours to less than three hours.

This comes as politicians have voiced greater interest in supporting smart city plans in Australia.

As part of the rail plan, proponents Consolidated Land and Rail Australia said it would create eight new smart cities along the magnetic levitation train route. The company says its smart cities would be kitted out with such beneficial aspects as renewable energy, low water usage, high-speed internet and affordable homes.

However, the Age raised concerns that the rail line may be a grand unattainable dream. Skepticism is partly coming from the idea of building eight entirely new smart cities from scratch, which is a monumental task by any standards.

High-speed rail but no new taxes?

As well, the claim that the entire project would be completed with no taxpayer money whatsoever also raised eyebrows.

The project proponents said they would finance the railroad and smart cities through real estate speculation of the land along the proposed train route. The company predicts that the cheap farmland they’ve already optioned on the train line would skyrocket in value as soon as residential developments were built.

The Age suggests that such a strategy makes this plan more a real estate play than an investment in transport or smart cities.

While Consolidated’s smart city-driven transport plan states that it will use not burden the public purse, an alternate high-speed rail plan already exists, which was developed at considerable public expense.

The $20 million federal study by AECOM was released in 2013. It projected that a high-speed rail line, which would cover the 1,750 km between Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, would have cost $84 billion in 2012 dollars.

Considering the current economic conditions in Australia, such a hefty price tag essentially ensures that such a rail line would not get built using public resources.