When PM Anthony Albanese was flying home after six days in Beijing, the Great Wall and a panda zoo, he  told  a newspaper that “Australia could learn from China’s fast-rail network". The People’s Republic already has _more than_ 45,000 kilometres of high-speed rail connecting 500 cities. We have zilch.

The lesson the prime minister brought back in his Boeing is that the local figure will remain – maybe forever unless chest-beating trumps economics.

Remember the whatever-it-costs battle to be first on the moon? The US won in 1969. Now the race is on land between China, Japan and South Korea. Slower — but still over 250kph — are bullet trains flying through 29 nations, though not the Wide Brown, despite us having the need for speed and vast empty spaces between town halls.

To feel the thrill, many assume a trip to the PRC or Europe. Wrong. Just nip across to nearby Jakarta.

Indonesia is known for unhygienic street food, grand-scale corruption (A$18.4 billion in the latest alleged company fraud) and fewer shootings than Melbourne. There are more Hondas than headscarves, the world’s most helpful people and five more km of high-tech rail than the US,

Whoosh, a contrived onomatopoeic acronym from Waktu Hemat, Operasi Optimal, Sistem Hebat, (Timesaving, Optimal Operation, Outstanding System) has been commercial for two years.

As Indonesians started zipping above wet paddy in ergonomic seats, Oz officials were pulling up chairs at the High-Speed Rail Authority meeting room in Newcastle to talk about thinking of going fast somewhere, sometime, maybe.

The Guardian claimed that “the HSRA has spent its infancy developing yet another business case, starting with Sydney-Newcastle, to ultimately form part of a Melbourne-Brisbane line in the second half of this century”.

In 2013, an Australian newspaper reported Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese flagging “fast rail construction to begin four years after Richard Branson starts space tours”.

(The tours were then scheduled for 2018; the first commercial edge-of-space trip was launched in 2023 when Whoosh started dashing south-east from Jakarta.)

Other lines are unlikely in Indonesia unless the government subsidises a Jakarta-Surabaya 780km extension, a rapidly vanishing possibility.

For the economics go slower than the hype: The A$11.2 billion Whoosh project overran by A$2.6 billion and suffered four years of delays. It’s a joint venture between an Indonesian consortium of state-owned companies and China Railway International.

Last year, the SOEs lost Rp4.19 trillion (A$400 million).

Whoosh is more about national pride than the ride. It’s promoted as the first high-speed railway in Southeast Asia and the Southern Hemisphere, dashing 143 kilometres at up to 348 kph, though mostly around 250.

The best we can currently do across the East Coast networks is a third of that speed on special tracks.

The transcontinental Indian Pacific takes three days to rattle across the 4350km Nullarbor Plain. Although opened in 1917, it took almost half a century to sort out the different state gauges and make the trip seamless.

Indonesia’s success in getting Whoosh whooshing shows why it won’t be duplicated in Australia. They’ve used cheap Chinese cash – we can’t. They’ve been lashed by an infrastructure-mad prez; our speciality is restraint, not rush.

“Infrastructure is certainly a soft power tool that China has used not only throughout Southeast Asia, but in the Pacific, South Asia, all over the world,” according to Lowy Institute researcher Grace Stanhope.

This month, China boasted a new magnetic levitation (maglev) train reaching 600kph. The Asia Times reported it goes three clicks faster than Japan’s fastest. Magnets raise the train and push it fast because there’s no track friction.

Indonesia has Whooshed – and burned its hands. There’ll be no more bullet trains dashing past the thick green paddocks of Java anytime soon unless the nation beds down with the PRC banks.

President Prabowo Subianto visits Beijing almost monthly, but he has to move cautiously because everyday Indonesians distrust and envy ethnic Chinese and hate communism as faith-free politics.

High-speed networks thrive best in authoritarian states where land can be seized and companies ordered to follow government directions. The system doesn’t work well in democratic market-driven countries like Indonesia and its southern neighbour, though Europe has found the formula linking speed with emission reductions and cross-border networks.

Whispering Whoosh is a masterpiece of Chinese engineering, supposedly linking two centres – the Republic’s capital with Bandung, the chief city in West Java.

That’s how it’s sold, and that’s untrue.

It starts in Halim, 14km from Central Jakarta and an hour in a cab through thick traffic and thicker pollution. Getting close to where commuters want to board would mean demolishing hectares of housing.

Whoosh hit problems in 2016 when the Air Force had a stoush with developers over access to 49 hectares of military land. At one stage, bureaucrats stalled on building permits – an issue Australians would understand.

Trains leave from a station more like an airport terminal including baggage and body scans. It could be Singapore but for the bumpy horizon of mountains dominated by Gunung Pangparang – looming almost 2000 metres above the nation’s third-largest city.

A one-way ticket costs Rp350,000 — aboutA$33 — a hefty fee for a low-wage commuter. Unsurprisingly, there were many empty seats when your correspondent boarded, though the company brags it carries six million passengers a year.

Whoosh draws tech-tourists and the burgeoning middle classes who can’t stand the uphill four-hour road journey to Bandung, though that’s not where the train stops.

The city is accessed via an overcrowded diesel “feeder”. Half an hour of silent speeding in a dedicated seat gets followed by 30 minutes in a stand-up clunker that spits hot travellers into street chaos.

This is what happens when developers don’t get all their carriages in a row and cut corners to meet deadlines. This is not an exclusive Indonesian experience.

Whoosh was built with Chinese loans under its Belt and Road scheme, aka the New Silk Road. It’s a joint venture between an Indonesian consortium of four state-owned companies and China Railway International Co Ltd.

B & R was launched in 2013 to connect East Asia with Europe, but better described as a debt trap for countries desperate to prove their modernity. That includes Indonesia.

Australian figures claim Whoosh cost “$52 million per kilometre, higher than China at $17–30 million, France about $24 million, or Spain ($27 million)”.

Higher costs suggest tougher terrain and bureaucratic delays; material prices and wages rarely fall between budgets and reality.

The last published estimate for a bullet train on the Sydney and Newcastle route was A$30 billion.

The pick-and-shovel stuff will face formidable barriers, including digging the world’s longest rail tunnel under the Hawkesbury River. The Feds have yet to commit to the 170km megaproject, which could take till the late 2030s to build; AUKUS subs might arrive sooner.

It takes no fiscal genius to know that the figure will expand exponentially by the time the first steel girders are craned onto sites. By then, maybe we’ll be like Indonesia, accessing renminbi and watching their engineers and labourers work 24/7.

Which is how these jobs get done in China.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.