On a positive note SA did a good job with the Tour Down Under with organisation and turnout comparable to Europe. However it seems to me Adelaide is utterly reliant on the grace and favour of Canberra. The Feds dole out subsidies to Holden, they fund makework military contracts (eg to build more submarines to replace the previous duds) and they force upstream irrigators out of business so the Coorong mullet can have slightly less salty water.

The next big appeal to Canberra will be to restrict gas price rises with gas accounting for nearly half SA's electricity. That will also make it harder to backup the proposed new wind farms. It seems to me with a third of the world's easily mined uranium they should expand that industry. That is mining, enrichment, nuclear power (including interstate baseload export) and reprocessing.

Instead it looks like the jobs and profits will be handed to others, notably China, on a plate. More and more unprocessed resources will be sent to China via the Darwin railway for that country to do the value adding. Never mind Canberra will always bail them out.

I wonder just how long it will taker for people like Malcolm to realise that an economy can't function on taking in each other's washing. This fixation on service based economies can work, but only for a limited number of places.

Adelaide ain't one of them, although it is trying, very trying.

At least Malcolm dose suggest SA s only salvation is a nuclear industry, but I'll bet that goes down like a lead balloon, in a community trained to handouts.

It really is time to decide Adelaide & South Australia in general was a mistake. It is time to make it the largest ghost town around, & move on.

Without pinching every one else's water it would dry up & die. After pinching everyone else's water it then wants to pinch billions of subsidies, payed for by the last 2 productive states.

Yes it's time to say bye bye Adelaide, a pretty but unviable settlement.

Hasbeen at least they can spell in SA "Payed" ?

Sounds great.
Like what Brizbanal was 20 years ago.
Now look at BB and weep.
A traffic choked concrete jungle.
And you want an Adelaide like that?
Leave it alone.
It is a good city.
Great to live in.

Can't be good at everything Kippy, what else are you good at?

To my mind it is better to be able to pay your own way, than be able to spell what you can't do.

I lived and worked in Adelaide from 1983-1994 when times were tough for me, but I found the right people who gave me the right advice at the right time with regard to housing and employment and education, and although I now live in the Philippines and married, none of this would have been possible without the Adelaide experience.

Adelaide is undervalued and underrated, even by its own: remember the 'multifunction polis'? But the Festival of Arts and Womadelaide are ongoing and outstanding success stories.

Don't give up on Adelaide, it's a unique work in progress, and not yet about to become the world's biggest ghost town.