Elizabeth Windsor has just enjoyed her best-ever tour of Australia, mainly because of widespread admiration for her grace and dignity, as well as the way in which she has shown to us all that old age is not a barrier to effective public service. In addition, she brought some stability to our chaotic political scene by calming down, at least for a couple of days, the insults that dominate the conduct of Australia’s leaders.

The other “Windsor” who has a major bearing on the life of Australia is Tony, the Federal Member for New England. He tells me that, when he met Her Majesty many years ago at the time when he was a newly-elected independent member of the New South Wales Parliament, they had a very brief discussion about their respective family trees, but, unfortunately, found not even the slightest connection. Continue reading “The Two Windsors” →

Let ne re-open the debate on the important subject of Regional Governments. There can be no doubt that our current structure of three levels of government and competing Houses of Parliament has reached its use-by date.

It is a relic of an old colonial era that was planned by a Parliament in London, most of whom had never ever left the shores of England, and couldn’t comprehend a distance of longer than a hundred miles. Their plans were approved by subservient State Governments here in Australia, who also had the additional vested interest of maintaining their personal and parochial power bases in the capital cities.

Local Governments were then created to enable individual power brokers to have even more power bases, and they were made very small in order to achieve and maintain personal fiefdoms.

We must now take decisive action and replace all state and local governments with regional ones that are given powers to deliver top quality services directly to their people in a far better way than happens now. We can do it with about sixty 60 such governments, and this will give us a perfect reason to close down the Senate in Canberra, as there will be no States to represent.

As it can all be timed to start from 2025 if we take action now, let me list the cities and towns around which the regional governments could be based:

New South Wales: Sydney, Newcastle, Wollongong, Bega, Albury, Wagga Wagga, Goulburn, Bathurst, Dubbo, Broken Hill, Katoomba, Tamworth, Moree, Grafton and Port Macquarie.

Victoria: Melbourne, Ballarat, Geelong, Bendigo, Warrnambool, Mildura, Swan Hill, Shepparton, Wangaratta, Bairnsdale and Warragul.

Queensland: Brisbane, Toowoomba, Roma, Stanthorpe, Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Emerald, Longreach, Mount Isa, Richmond, Townsville, Cairns, Thursday Island and Mackay.

South Australia: Adelaide, Mount Gambier, Renmark, Port Augusta and Port Lincoln.

Western Australia: Perth, Bunbury, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie, Esperance, Albany, Port Hedland and Broome.

Tasmania: Hobart, Launceston, Devonport, Queenstown and Ross.

Northern Territory: Alice Springs and Darwin.

ACT: Canberra.

In a number of cases, regional governments would cross existing state borders, such as joining the Gold Coast with the North Coast of New South Wales, putting Tenterfield with Stanthorpe, Mount Gambier with Hamilton, the communities on both sides of the Murray River, etc. The ACT would not be needed, and Canberra would be the headquarters of a regional government as well as the Federal Government, and would expand to cover places like Queenbeyan.

Each of the new Regional Capitals would become a centre of education and have a freight hub which will drive economic growth, thereby decentralising the population of Australia in a really significant way. Most vitally, all regional governments would have only one house of Parliament — no Senate.

 

You will recall that, in the August Edition, I expressed my strong support for Paul Keating’s view that the Senate is ‘an unrepresentative swill’. As a result, I have been happily swamped with emails, phone calls, text messages and conversations, 95 per cent of whom were strongly in favour of its abolition.

Six interesting possibilities arose from those discussions; Continue reading “The Senate is on Borrowed Time” →

PAUL KEATING is not the most loveable of characters, but he does have a wonderful turn of phrase and, on one of the few occasions that I agreed with him, he accurately described the Senate as “an unrepresentative swill.”

I reckon that few people will disagree with him. It is a quite unfortunate institution that is an utter waste of money, and does not in any way represent the basic principles of democracy. Continue reading “The time has come to get rid of the Unrepresentative Swill” →