Congestion costs Australia about $17 billion a year. Building more roads will not solve it. Sydney and Melbourne need expanded rail networks to the newer west in both cities, not more freeways.

Anti-tax Coalition governments oppose congestion taxes. In Singapore, Taiwan and Japan, conservative governments have imposed congestion taxes, got cars off roads and by pouring money into public transport got people into it and at the same time got more economic value out of their roads as a free spin off. They became the Asian tigers and unless Australia improves its transport mentality, by comparison we will become slow-moving sea slugs.

Now to transport technology. Political donations by the fossil-fuel industry to both sides, but more so the Coalition, has perverted not just energy policy, but also transport policy. During the past election Coalition vilified electric vehicles.

Australia is in danger of being left behind and Government inaction will result in Australians being denied the earliest possible take-up of more efficient, cheaper and less polluting electric vehicles. Simplistic comparisons of purchase prices are misleading. Lower running and maintenance costs of electric vehicles and lower pollution must also be considered. The tragedy is that the Federal Government refuses to recognise the inevitable and is acting as a brake rather than accelerant of the change which if done well would benefit all of us (except those in the fossil industry).

We could slash the $30 billion a year import of petroleum products for a start.

Electric cars, of course, would mean more people wanting cheaper renewable electricity – so the fossil industry and their political payees oppose that.

People will make their own economic choices whatever government do, and will move to electric vehicles. Governments should put aside their ideology and donors and make that transition smoother in the best interests of Australians generally.

The other transport technology being suppressed by ideology is telematics – computer collection and distribution of data about individual vehicle travel, in particular where and when.

The technology is here. It could be used to impose fairer charges according to use rather than registration and fuel taxes. Fuel taxes are unfair because the wealthy can afford newer more fuel-efficient vehicles and fuel-free electric vehicles.

But post-election politicians are now even more shy of any tax changes.

Telematics help enforce safety rules about heavy-vehicle driving hours and speeding. They could also be used for cars. But politicians reserve big brother for monitoring the media for “breaches of national security” rather than for practical safety enforcement.

And ideology and politics also entered the fray when unions used heavy-vehicle safety regulation as a weapon in a fight for higher pay. Reasonable as the fight might be, it was the wrong forum. Similarly, moves to greater maritime freight between Australian ports is consumed by owners wanting cheap, exploited foreign labour and unions wanting overpaid and over-regulated Australian labour with no hope of a sensible middle ground.

Moreover, the states jealously guard their traffic enforcement role and vehicle taxing regimes, so sensible reform gives way to federal-state rivalry.

Telematics can improve efficiency by monitoring minute-by-minute congestion and providing real-time advice to drivers to avoid it and generally advising about best routes. But again politics intervenes when local governments imposing haphazard restrictions on heavy vehicles out of all proportion to the cost of detours.

An efficient transport system makes use of the best mode for each journey and develops each mode accordingly. But political donations and political power grabs and will favour existing modes. So road and air have until quite recently stunted the growth of rail.

Even so we dither over a very fast train. Spain is poorer than Australia and Madrid and Barcelona are significantly smaller than Sydney and Melbourne, yet there is a very fast train service between them (2 hours 30 minutes) 19 times a day over much the same distance.

Lastly to safety. We pour vast amounts of money into new roads and bridges and for the upkeep and improvement of existing ones. Voters love it. We all use roads. But crash victims have little political clout, as we are seeing in the ACT and other jurisdictions as compensation regimes are whittled away.

Few people appreciate the true cost of road crashes. Each year they cost Australia more than all the new roads and bridges and upkeep and improvement of existing ones combined – $27 billion as against $21 billion, aside from the human cost.

Yet we build ever more roads and freeways, dangerously pitting ever more tracks against cars and jam urban roads to breaking point, not even factoring in crash costs when deciding between road and rail development.

To have a strong economy, rather than just talk about it, Australia must remove ideology and politics from transport decisions, otherwise we will fossilise in the late 20 th century while other countries move to a brighter future in the 21 st.