Peter Beattie seems to be having a problem with understanding our electorol system. He appears to think he has been elected Lord Mayor of Brisbane. Perhaps, if any of you know him, personally, you could wisper in his ear, HE IS PREMIER OF THE STATE OF QUEENSLAND.

You could please explain to him that means his area of responsibility actually extends more than 25 Km from Brisbane CBD. The rest of the state is not just a water catchment, & mine, to supply the needs of Brisbane, it realy is a place where people live. Tax paying people, who have needs, just like Brisbane.

Its probably very nice to have little dinky bridges over the river, & interconnected walking, & cycling paths, for the in people, but Peter, lift your horizon a little, the rest of the state is falling apart, or are you too busy playing sand castles to notice?

There is probably some bias towards Brizzie but I don’t see it as being that significant.

Expenditure should be roughly correlated to regional population sizes and distribution, so the southeast corner should get the lion’s share.

A lot of people in my part of the world (Townsville – Cairns) would probably agree with you. But I think that expenditure on infrastructure is pretty evenly spread. Afterall, the quality of life in the north isn’t any worse than in the southeast corner… in fact I would argue it is actually a whole lot better.

There is a lot of merit in keeping the majority of population growth and the necessary expenditure to support it in the southeast corner. It seems to me that there hasn’t been anywhere near enough expenditure on basic infrastructure and services in SEQ, compared to the rapidly increasing demand.

Now the north is suffering from accelerating growth rates, partly due to the water crisis and other reductions in quality of life in SEQ.

Townsville and Cairns are progressively facing more and more of the problems that have developed in SEQ in conjunction with rapid growth and poor management of it.

I reckon that a greater proportion of government money spent in SEQ and less in the north, now and over the past two or three decades, would almost definitely result in a better quality of life for us in the north, not the other way round. And I could probably say the same for just about all of regional Queensland.

I can't comment on what proportion of state expenditure is spent on what region, but is it fair that the residents of the Mary Valley face destruction of their community (see http://www.savethemaryriver.com) because Peter Beattie, at the behest of land speculators and property developers, who now contribute even more to Queensland ALP coffers than do the unions, recklessly encouraged population growth in South East Queensland before considering where the necessary water would come from?

"You could please explain to him that means his area of responsibility actually extends more than 25 Km from Brisbane CBD. The rest of the state is not just a water catchment, & mine, to supply the needs of Brisbane, it realy is a place where people live. Tax paying people, who have needs, just like Brisbane."

The same city/rural imbalance also exists in Western Australia. The metrocentric WA Labor Government seems to forget that life actually exists elsewhere in the state outside of Perth.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that Perth itself is far removed from the state's major mining regions. So although the state government is awash with mining royalties, this revenue is not being shared with the people of regional and rural WA. Rather, it is being almost entirely redirected toward parasitic Perth. This is nothing short of grand larceny.

Oligarch,

Whilst the point you make about the wealth going from the mining and agricultural regions of WA to Perth has some validity, I still think we need to also acknowledge that Australia's mineral wealth is a non-renewable natural resource which rightly belongs to all Austalians as well as to future generations of Australians.

So, I would not be in favour of all the wealth from mining being kept in the mining regions, either, and I am not in favour of the current frenetic rate of of extraction which is taking away resources from future generations as well as endangering our planet.

I think that there is a great deal of misunderstanding amongst most people who believe that regional areas are missing out on funding.

People tend to see only the bad side in relation to services and infrastructure that are absent or not up to their desired standard in their regional or rural area. If they were to look at places that do have the quality of infrastructure that they desire, they would see various other problems which they don’t suffer from.

Areas with good quality infrastructure and services tend to be large population centres, which have higher crime rates, congestion, an impersonal attitude compared to a small community, and so on.

It is a matter of economies and diseconomies of scale. Practically all good developments are accompanied by some diseconomies of scale.

People who choose to live in the back-blocks have exercised a lifestyle choice. Most of them like the uncrowded wide open atmosphere. Of course there are trade-offs, such as long distances to a hospital, long waiting times for an ambulance or flying doctor, etc. If they really don’t like this, most are free to move to the coast or to a larger town.

The bottom line is; the absence of high quality infrastructure and services in regional areas does not correlate well with a lower quality of life in those areas compared to the large population centres. And it is overall quality of life that we should always considering as the paramount factor.