The worst thing about our Federal government is its even more lunatic push than the previous government for higher immigration, a higher birthrate, a greater economic turnover and a greater rate of overall human expansion.

If the state governments were to mitigate this insanity, there might be some purpose to their existence. But they don’t! They just go along with the madness.

So what’s the point of their existence?

I’m in two minds; I’d like think that some of the state governments might in the near future see the writing on the wall about the imperative of developing a sustainable society and start pushing back against Rudd’s lunatic escalation of the antisustainablility momentum.

But at present, they are all partners in crime with the Feds, reinforcing the grossly inappropriate direction that this country is being taken in, and they quite frankly shouldn't exist if this is going to continue.

Can you imagine a business where there are six independent divisions squabbling about the responsibility of headoffice? Where they also compete AGAINST one another and with resistance to accountability?

Where there is every opportunity to blame head office such as for health and education and then head office can blame the states for its deficiencies.

Where there is fragmentation of the essentials of the business competitiveness in education and where the states can be picked off against each other by international investors with no accountability for failures as it was "the previous government".

Until such time Australia incorporates as one nation, we will remain a second rate country which we are by any measure if we take out the removalist industry as we might properly call our minerals and petroleum activities.

Where every attempt for two decades, excepting Burrup Fertilisers for adding value to our endowments has failed. What a joke federalism is!

So lets stop dreaming Ludwig about doing something responsible.

remco,

New Zealand has three tiers of government – national parliament, territorial councils and local councils.

Australia is just one of 80 countries in the world with more than 10 million people, all of which have at least three tiers of government, as does every one of the 51 countries of more than 500,000 square kilometers.

Russia, China, Brazil, Canada, the USA and India, being all the countries anywhere near Australia in size, have at least one intermediate level of government. China actually has both provinces and prefectures between its national and its municipal government. European nations much smaller in area than Australia such as France, Germany and Italy have at least three tiers of government. In fact, both France and Italy have two intermediate tiers between the national and the local.

Even citizens of the oft-quoted United Kingdom have four (or, in some parts of the country, five) tiers of government – the European Parliament, the UK Parliament, regional assemblies (elected in the case of Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Greater London, unelected in the rest of the country) and unitary local authorities or, in some places, both county councils and district councils.

The whole world could be wrong, but I doubt it. If the states were abolished, thus making Australia unique among the world’s large countries, the bureaucracy would remain the same size, and the levels of decision-making would remain the same. The only difference would be the people would not get to elect those who made the decisions at the intermediate level.