Rail will fail
I'm amazed anyone believes anyone is going to cough up billions for a high speed rail link that no air traveller in their right mind would use.
Hong Kong works fine, London would work better if went further in than Paddington, and Paris is said to be great too from all reports.
But an airport outside the Sydney basin, like near here as in down the road in Goulburn would be a joke. Who the ferk is going to struggle to get to an airport transfer platform at Central if they live in the suburbs and then spent a hundred bucks to lurch out into the spinifex to some sort of airport that will waste so much bleedin' time getting to that may as well fly to Brisbane or Melbourne from the existing airport to make better connections.
The whole idea of an airport outside of Sydney but for Sydney is not on. Put in the single runway that I'm told could be done at Badgerys to make it work to solve part of the problem, and do something incredibly ballsy at Sydney like lifting the movement cap, or putting turbo props out at Little Bay, or extending the footprint at Sydney by reclaiming more land or buy up a few hundrfed acres of Mascot and redo the space to park and service jets.
But, DO SOMETHING , because if 'they in power' or we don't, Brisbane or Melbourne will do it for you and me, and Sydney can decline into a paralysed mass of old people wondering where all the new jobs and business headquarters went.
Hey, I like high speed rail. I did Eurostar and a trip on the ICE a few years back. Loved it. But they drew their customers from several hundred million people. We've got 20 million. We need to spend megabucks on decent defence and education and health, instead of hosing it down the gurgler on grandiose railways that nobody will use, if they ever get built anyhow.
Hell, the trains from here to Sydney take nearly as long as flight to Perth, and none of the trains in Sydney work effectively anyhow.
We need to bite the bullets. A bigger, better main airport, and another new build at Badgery's to hook into the M7.