You're partly right mate. But you've chosen the most convoluted complex rationalist's solution.

A better solution would be, recognise local government, then get rid of the costly, crisis, corruption-riddled state governments. Then divide their duties/responsibilities between Fed and local government. Aided by massive regional autonomy, and a means-tested pro-rata direct funding model that eliminates much of the administrative bottlenecks and inequity!

In so doing recover 70+ annual billions that can be directed at vastly overdue nation building

We only need look at the huge disparity of school funding to understand our funding paradigms are broken. We should instead, fund each student as a means-tested, locale-tested grant, the parents direct, not spend. Then allow every school to compete for student numbers and with those numbers, their total funding.

Means testing ensuring disadvantaged communities get a fairer shake!

Public health the same way, with a means-tested colour-coded Medicare card, that'd then allow patients to choose hospitals and doctors by directing their benefit. As such have the health "industry" compete for clientele, as their only source of funding.

Aged care subsidies ought only be directed at the not for profit sector!

To eliminate some of the worst practises and we need a different aged care model that allows the elderly to stay in their own homes until they pass over.

With chelation therapy and routine hyperbaric oxygen, chambers, (trailable) taken as routine care to the elderly. These two very cheap and available, could literally halve the medical assistance and medicine the elderly are required to partake/imbibe? And more than halve our aged care pharmaceutical budget?

And given we do that!? Literally, halve the current cost of (currently) substandard aged health care. By allowing the elderly clientele to direct their aged care benefit to, competing for clientele, providers!

With a new model in place and provided entirely by the federal government! The ritualistic blame shifting etc, will no longer be available to any incompetent money-wasting administration. And those entities within that are the cause of these never-ending rorts, ripoffs etc.can be exposed for what and who they are and moved on! TBC
Alan B.

We have allowed insatiable profit-hungry developers to build cities are both crumbling before our very eyes decades too soon and are hopelessly gridlocked the latter costing multiple billions in lost production and efficiency!

We need rapid rail and brand new cities! Serviced and power by 3 cents PKWH or less MSR thorium. Thorium is transformed to U233 that then is allowed to decay inside the reactor to produce relatively high quantities of affordable cancer miracle cure, bismuth 213.

This alpha particle isotope is attached to an antibody that then goes directly to the cancer, killing it and in numerous reported trails, without significantly harming healthy cells. Ovarian cancer is a killer that almost always resurfaces in conventional chemotherapy after an average period of five years? And as a stage four death sentence cancer.

However, conventional medicine, i.e., alpha particle bismuth 213 therapy has shown in numerous trials, in conventional medical clinics in Europe, to have an almost 100% remission rate even in stage four?

Other cancers that have reportedly, been successfully treated via alpha particle bismuth 213, include death sentence cancers, like pancreatic cancer, myeloid leukemia. And some very nasty inoperable, brain cancers.

In fact, one can envisage bismuth 213 being attached to many antibodies to cure other incurable terminal diseases that also produce antibodies? And such clinics could be rolled out in many rural and regional communities to get a nice healthy medical tourism installed and resuscitating many dying rural communities! All that missing is the political will!

Last but not least is the rollout of deionisation dialysis desalination that when coupled to 3 cents PKWH MSR thorium, could not only drought-proof this nation but turn much of our arid inland into our most productive agriculture precincts!

All that's missing is intelligent leadership and the political will

And 3 cents PKWH MSR thorium would also allow us to lead the world in low carbon metals smelting and steel industry that exports lowest carbon lowest cost steel and aluminium to the world! All that's missing is can do intelligence and the indomitable political will!
Alan B.

Both Everald & Alan have missed the main reasons for the shrinking country towns.

Firstly the railways. In the days of steam tens of thousands travelled by train, & the majority of freight moved on trains. Many towns had railway workshops, & the labour requirement of stations was very large. Towns like Blaney NSW thrived on railway work, & little towns like Howard Qld had 7 passenger trains stopping every day, a large goods siding & workforce.

Secondly the towns were the supplier of all things to the farm community & the townsfolk. People bought in the towns, & had repairs done in town.

Then came economic expansion. People expected more than had been sufficient B4, [before the war]. The soldier settler block of a square mile, 640 acres just could not provide a reasonable living as expected in most of Australia. Remember the cry, "get big or get out". Wheat farms went from 640 acres to a couple of thousand acres. Grazing required even bigger acreage to be viable.

The number of farmers using the towns shrunk to a quarter in a very short time. The bigger, better off farmers started going to the city a few times a year to do the shopping once done in town, They even sent their kids off to boarding schools, rather than school in the towns.

Only towns with profitable small size farming continued to grow. Places like Bathurst, Blaney & Cowra are in decline, where Young, with a large expansion of cherry orchards is growing rapidly. The farmers are prosperous, but not so much that they fly to the big smoke a few times a year. The high school which had 320 pupils in the late 50s has over 750 today. Howard with it's citrus orchards lost out to US fruit, & has shrunk greatly.
Continued

Continued.

Smaller states may help, but if it only increased the number of politicians & bureaucrats it would be detrimental in every way.

Now these small towns have the internet to contend with. Even in the suburbs stores are closing having lost their market to internet retailers. It is fine to say, support your local retailers or lose them, but it is so much easier, [& often cheaper], to jump on the net & have it delivered.

Perhaps the towns will return if the global warming nutters succeed in taking our cars off us, & the planes from the air.

Anybody who just doesn't get that the foundations for a healthy inclusive economy are largely reliant on genuinely affordable energy and affordable reliable water. And that reliable affordable water relies on genuinely affordable energy.

Just about all production, transport and service have both an energy component and a water component. Neither of which are assisted by parasitic pompous pettifogging politicians who think only of captive markets and being able to maximise revenue ahead of outcomes or service.

And how to further entrench their power and position, plus their income and entitlements! Ahead of the national interest and national interest! Am I the only one tired beyond reason of the endless excuses for not taking a pragmatic bipartisan position and just crack on with what every boy and his dog knows we will have to do eventually.

Kicking the can down the road and on generations yet unborn! Just doubles, triples or quadruples cost outcomes! And or, puts them out of reach!

It's simplistic pennywise pound foolish to defer and defer to protect narrow vested, if powerful interest! Rapid rail deferred and deferred to just to ostensively, protect domestic, carbon-spewing airlines, e.g.

And as we can see from the last half-century, deferred decisions serve nobody, nor ever save money, just the very opposite, and bigtime!

Just narrow short term interests and numbskull political outcomes. That then are almost obsolete or like new coal-fired power stations unfundable and unable to pass a coherent risk analysis assessment!

Go figure! I'll address real tax reform on another day. And an essential part of any coherent forward thing vision! And massively simplified with bracket creep ancient history, Not something dishonest pollies can have up their sleeve to fool those they allegedly serve, to create a so-called surplus!
Alan B.

I flagged rapid rail Hasbeen! and the brand new cities they would both serve and help create!

Should have gone to Specsavers old mate!
Alan B