Given that WA is ignored in general anyhow, apart from taking
Dollars to fill federal coffers, making decisions in Canberra
as to what goes on here, would be even worse!

Best in that case that WA would secede and let you people
over their paddle your own canoes.

"Beattie said recently: "I've never seen a group of politicians losing their jobs ever cop it on the chin"... that's the trouble with politicians... no memory.

Didn't the ALP in Qld rid us all of the corrupt upper house some years ago?

The only State to be freed of these time-serving lurkmeisters.

These days it would be seen to be 'un-Australian' to do anything like that.... the 'fair go' would kick in, and we'd see 'pollie mateship' take over, even amongst total strangers, so I hear.

Anyway, Canberra can't run anything efficiently now, why would anyone believe they would without the States there?

The same groups of people who enter State parliaments would move to regional assemblies, why is there any notion that a completely different class would spring up to take over?

Far better just to try to make what we have, work... but we could do away with more upper house lurkers around this wide brown land.

Let the contribution from "Yabby" be a lesson to the rest of you. As long as we have whackos over here in WA who are still advocating secession, constitutional change to abolish state governments will never happen.

Wow! I wonder if we could get rid of - wait for it...Canberra?

I look at the Brisbane City Council they cover a huge area,and from when I lived in QLD to me,they did not appear to do a bad job.
Then I look at Perth,what a joke less people but more councils, CEOS and assorted hangers on we have heaps.
Let start by having one Council for one City,god knows how much that would save here in Perth,biggest problem is it might increase the unemployment figures.

Victoria has 12 senators, 37 federal MPs, 88 state MLAs, 40 state MLCs and about 600 local councillors in 79 councils. (An hour of searching has not provided me with the exact number of the last.) That is a total of about 777 politicians, one for every 6,577 people or one for every 305 square kilometres. It puts the UK figures in perspective. The UK’s number of politicians per head is three and a half times Victoria’s; the UK’s number of politicians per square kilometre is nine times Victoria’s.

It also leaves, on the author’s figures, some 21,000 councillors for the other five states and the Northern Territory. There are just over 600 local government areas outside Victoria, which means that, on the author’s figures, the average council has some 33 councillors on it. I have never heard of a council with that many councillors. I suspect the figure of 22,600 Australian politicians is way wrong.

If these jurisdictions had the same number of councillors per head as Victoria, we would have 18,000 fewer councillors. I do not recommend that because all the mainland states are much bigger than Victoria.

If we really want to reduce the number of politicians, we could reduce the number of councils and/or the number of councillors in each council. Removing states would remove a trivial number of politicians.

The other advantage that the states (except for Queensland) have over councils is that they have bicameral legislatures which ensure that every government (except Queensland’s) is held to account by a Legislative Council that does not control. In every state but Tasmania that Legislative Council is more representative of the voters than the Lower House because the former is elected by proportional representation.

If we were founding Australia today, we would certainly have at least a three-tier system, in line with the thinking of every other reasonably sized, reasonably populated, reasonably wealthy country on the planet, though we might increase the number of states.