Self-sustaining. RE-powered. Agrivoltaic. World design competition. Net zero from day one. 500 to 100,000 people. Rent $150 per week. Maglev station built at Stage 1. The corridor town is the most ambitious civic-design project in Australian history.
Australian suburbs are designed for the 1960s car and developer margin — not families. Minimum ceilings, no light, no storage, no community. Car-dependent, fence-separated, garage-facing. Mental illness and loneliness highest in the newest suburbs. The design is the disease.
Every regional town depends on supply chains it does not control: food from the coast, power from a grid it does not own, fuel from overseas, materials from distant factories. No water storage. No local energy reserve. When the chain breaks the town has nothing.
Drug rehab, mental health, aged care — clinical, isolated, underfunded, architecturally wrong. No third spaces. No tech jobs. No beauty in regional design. Corrugated iron, bitumen carparks, fluorescent shops. No plan for growth. No reason to stay.
Global competition for every corridor town. Brief: self-sustaining, RE-powered, community-centred, suited to climate and country, local materials, expandable 500 to 100,000 people, genuinely beautiful. The best minds on earth design towns Australians will live in for 1,000 years. Australian architects, planners, and Indigenous custodians on every brief and every jury.
Power: corridor HVDC + town agrivoltaic microgrid. Water: pipeline + rainwater + greywater recycling. Food: agrivoltaic farms, hydroponic, aquaculture, orchards. Materials: hempcrete, rammed earth, local stone, managed timber. The supply chain is the town itself. When the world stops, the town keeps running.
Solar panels elevated over agricultural land — crops grow beneath in partial shade with reduced water needs. Power generated above, food grown below. Every hectare does two jobs. 8–9 peak sun hours in the interior. Higher combined yield than any single-use alternative. The corridor town's food and power are produced on the same land.
Corridor HVDC spine + town solar microgrid + battery storage + pump hydro where terrain allows. Building envelope eliminates load before a watt is drawn: earth-sheltered, passive solar, deep eaves. Power cost to residents: effectively zero. Surplus sold to corridor grid — town revenue from day one.
Hempcrete: carbon-negative, insulating, fire-resistant, improves with age. Grown along the corridor, processed in-town. Hemp fibre for textiles. Hemp seed for food and oil. Hemp composites for panels and furniture. The crop that builds the town, feeds it, and clothes it.
Maglev station built at Stage 1 — not planned for later. Every corridor town connected at 500km/h. Roma to Brisbane ~45 minutes. Broken Hill to Sydney ~1 hour. Any town to its nearest capital under 2 hours. EV-first within town: no internal combustion, no petrol stations, no diesel noise. Town manufactures its own EV conversion kits.
Every corridor town has terabit fibre, satellite redundancy, and an AusLLM compute precinct. Remote-first work makes corridor living competitive with the cities for any knowledge-economy job. Specialised research-and-manufacturing precincts attached to relevant towns: agrivoltaic R&D, hempcrete research, autonomous logistics, sovereign AI, aerospace.
Each corridor town has work at every skill level and every stage of life: construction, agriculture, hospitality, light manufacturing, research, services. The town design ensures meaningful work is never more than 15 minutes away. The retiree who wants three days of part-time work has a place. The graduate who wants a PhD-level research role has a precinct.
Every corridor town has a permanent town lake — water storage, evaporative cooling, recreation, biodiversity, and the visual and social heart of the town. Filled and maintained from the corridor pipeline. The lake is the town square.
| Current — The Failure | MMP — The Solution |
|---|---|
| Suburbs designed for the 1960s car and developer margin. | Towns designed by the best minds on earth via global competition. |
| Regional towns depend on supply chains they do not control. | Self-sustaining: power, water, food, materials all produced locally. |
| Power bills among world's highest. Grid imported, retail margins extracted. | Power cost effectively zero to residents. Surplus sold to corridor — town revenue. |
| Houses face the garage. No third spaces. No community. | Houses face the public realm. Community squares, town lake, walkable design. |
| Maglev planned for 'sometime later' — never built. | Maglev station built at Stage 1. Every town connected at 500km/h. |
| Imported building materials, high embodied carbon. | Hempcrete, rammed earth, local stone, managed timber — grown along the corridor. |
| Rent unaffordable to working families. | Rent $150/wk from day one. Rent-to-buy pathway. |
No memos pinned to this policy yet. When an MMP memo on this topic is published, it will appear here with a short summary. The full memo index is at moralmajority.com.au/memos.html.