Yes, we could have strings of nuclear power stations E - W and N - S to provide power for a national network of high speed trains, and power for water pipelines to bring the huge amounts of water that fall each year in the NW and NE of of Australia to the southern and central areas that need it.
Manufacturing towns would grow along these axes, for the maintenance of the rail and pumping stations, and in South Australia we could get heaps of free electrical power from the huge barely untouched geothermal reserves we have there, and the constant droughts of the past, might become a thing of the past.
Think what the E - W railway and the Hoover dam did for the US a century or so ago, the "Clever Can Do Country" we could be ?
