One topic which came up was a discussion of these terms. Intuitively,
"urban" means the the "big cities", "regional" means "large towns"
and "rural" means other stuff.

This at least one major use of the word. "Region" can be a boundary drawn
on a map to delineate a "region", but normally "regional" is used to
refer to non-urban non-rural places within Australia. This can can be
a little confusing :)

David made an attempt to define "Regional Australia" :

> A political definition: everyone outside the general semi-conurbations
> which surround state and federal capitals.  By that definition the
> non-regional centres are: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide,
> Canberra-Queanbeyan, Newcastle, Central Coast, Wollongong, Hobart,
> Geelong, Rockingham.  Doubtful cases Gold Coast-Tweed Heads and Darwin.
> I'm sure there are others I am missing through geographical ignorance.

> Non-regional: 10.8M (minimum) Doubtful: 0.4M Regional: 5.2M (maximum,
> inferred from total population in local govts)

> The local government statistics have a concentration around 20K to 320K,
> which probably says more about the doctrines of public administrators in
> the local government departments than about Australian demographics.

> The ratio isn't as large as I expected.  Of course, all these figures
> are six years old.  The concentration in the big cities must have
> increased considerably in that time.  And if we are planning for the
> future we should think as though that trend has continued.  Plus some of
> those I have counted in "regional" are probably in small satellites of
> the big cities.

Mark posted a listing of the populations of different country towns and
Local Government areas. David further commented :

> One moral is the dominance of the large cities: look at the population
> living in urbanisations of population between:

     5K to 10K	   634K
    10K to 20K	   692K
    20K to 40K	   888K
    40K to 80K	   617K
    80K to 160K	   537K
   160K to 320K	  1030K
   320K to 640K	   323K
   640K to 1.28M	  2075K
  1280K to 2.56M	  1291K
  2.56M to 5.12M	  6142K

> The relative paucity of medium-sized towns -- from which we might hope
> to draw our regional cores -- is striking.  And the natural consequence
> is the Bradley complaint: that regions would be made up of too many
> small towns, with no common interests.

> This is one reason I'm sceptical of any model of Australian governance
> that spends most of its thought on regional Australia.  Any new model
> ought to have "how we handle governing big cities" on page one, and "how
> we handle governing Upper Woop-Woop" somewhere around appendix J.

Max wrote about "regional"

> The term regional came to my notice some 25 years ago when the
> government of the day reckoned that Albury should be a growth centre,
> and since that time places like Albury, Wagga, Mildura, and Shepparton,
> have been regional, and the rest has been rural, which is were I fit in.

So, the word "regional" was an excuse to declare country centres to be
"economic growth centres".

Simon wrote, on regions being boundaries on the map rather than something
indicating the character of the region :

> An alternative name to "Region" or Province is "County".  IIUC, counties
> still exist in Australia (or at least in NSW) and are referred to in
> Land Titles etc.  The Sydney Basin for example is the County of
> Cumberland.  This term might have a greater historical connection with
> those of Anglo-Saxon background whereas "Province" has overtones of
> colonialism or imperialism for me.

So, historically, it seems there were "regions". Further, Simon writes :

> It seems some of you wish to "create" regions before or at the same time
> that they get regional powers and abolition of the States.

> Perhaps we need another Gough Whitlam to establish some regional
> development authorities like he tried in Albury-Wodonga and
> Bathurst-Orange.

AJ gives an historical perspective on this :

> Max is right, it [regional development] got massively popularised in the
> 1970s under Whitlam, but really that was just the death-throes of the
> type of 'regional planning' embedded in ideas of wholescale national
> economic planning which was popular from the late 1930s on.  That's when
> economists and geographers starting inputting into how things like
> the Great Depression could be avoided, then how the national war
> effort could be most efficiently managed, and then, particularly, how
> the reconstructed postwar economy should look.

> Ironically, many state governments (e.g.  NSW & Qld) latched onto the
> 1940s-50s regional planning push because they saw it as a way of
> continuing to counter pressure for new states.  Before the centralised
> planning era, I think it was more widely accepted across Australia that
> the means of giving government a better constitutional fit was to
> subdivide the states and create more - that's how you got your regional
> government (or at least how Tasmanians, Adelaideans, Melburnians and
> Brisbanites got theirs).  Certainly that was still the dominant view in
> Queensland well into the 20th century.  Our polling shows it's still
> there (first preference of 15% of Queensland adult population) but no
> longer nearly so dominant.

> Then when Whitlam got a bit more serious again about regions in the
> 1970s, the link between regional planning and national centralised
> planning helped bring all sorts of good ideas unstuck...  mainly because
> by the mid-late 1970s, oil shocks and modern economic instability etc
> meant centralised planning was going massively out of fashion just when
> we were really trying to get into it!  However, it's also why a lot of
> people still baulk at the idea of trying to restructure government
> around regions, they still associate it with old-ALP centralisation
> agendas, not something that is about BOTH greater efficiency AND
> political decentralisation.

And what about "rural" Australia ? David attempted a definition :

> anyone living on a farm or in a town whose economic basis relies on
> services to farmers?  And no, I have no idea how many such people there
> are.  I don't even know whether Armidale, where I grew up, would
> qualify, it's sort of marginal

A town which services a mine would have a lot in common with such an
area, being also focused around a defined primary industry.

A next obvious question is, how are they different ? How are things done
in these different regimes, and how might we approach them in a revised
government system ?

Where would the city fit ? Pat suggests they be "special cases" :

> If we are after a more equitable system (the original motivation for our
> system), then I think that the most equitable means may indeed to stop
> being so naive, and treat Sydney, Newcastle, and Wollongong as special
> cases.  In these larger centres, they may have more members,
> proportional to the number of people, but in a regional scenario, they
> should have an equal vote, i.e.  20 councillors/governors whose vote only
> counts as one, equal to all other regions (i.e.  they hold their own
> internal vote to decide their regions position).

> From the original system, as it has grown so lopsided, I think that it
> is no longer equitable, and has resulted in unhealthy economic growth,
> constricted to particular areas.  As we move into the information age, I
> think such restrictions are no longer necessary, or useful for the long
> term sustained growth of Australia.

> The Olympics was a case in point in demonstrating to me how small
> Australia is.  Firstly, we had to change all structural steel to other
> components, as all steel production for a number of months was aimed
> solely at the Olympics.  Following that, there was the same case with
> bricks.

> From a defensive point of view, Australia is also very vulnerable to
> sabotage by confining the majority of it's physical and intellectual
> assets in small confined areas.

Max talks about the nature of a rural council :

> The NT is 1,346,000 sq.  km and Brisbane is 200 sq.  km.  so my shire
> fits in there, it is 2,200 sq km.

> [ 300 rural councils like my own ] do not tender out these operations
> they do them themselves.  We do not have a local police station, out of
> business hours we have two police on duty to cover 3,500 sq km, six town
> and 10,000 people, so the police do not handle barking dogs as it is a
> council responsibility.

> The idea of serving at both local and [higher] levels is problematic,
> at the moment I spend two days a week on council stuff and that is with
> population of 8000 so if the area was to be bigger or more people then
> where would I get time for national stuff.

> (I am on the Berrigan skate board committee, the Berrigan tidy towns
> committee, the Berrigan District Development committee, the Suicide
> prevention committee, the Berrigan tourist committee, and some more, as
> a representative of council, to report back to council.)

> My council does not want any part of running health or the police as we
> have no real idea of doing this.

About the council in Broome, Max says :

> This council already implements most government services.

This is an interesting statement about Rural Australia. In a direct sense,
perhaps this is true, at least in terms of "actual work done" in the area.

However, I can think of many areas where while "actual work done" is not
implemented by local councils, a "framework" is provide by State and Federal
government which impacts and supports rural activity.

For example : Electricity (State), Driver's licenses (state), aircraft
regulation (Federal), Radio and TV (Federal), Trade (Federal), Transport
(State and Federal).  In some cases an individual must go out of the
rural council to take advantage of these facilities, but they are
nevertheless provided by state and Federal governments.

Max's point seems to be that rural councils "work well", and that to
remove this in pursuit of government reform is to miss an important
cost.

In reply to Max's statement about the scale of operations in a rural
council, Charles feels that the idea that government should be in
business is on from the "dark ages", and :

> Most enlightened governments realised years ago that competing private
> enterprises achieve better levels of service at less cost to
> tax-payers/rate-payers than do 'council workers'.

In reply, Max points to the problems of privatisation :

> 1988 Shires of Cobram, Yarrawonga, Numurkah and Nathalia, the average
> rates for these four shires was 10.4% less then the Berrigan Shire.

> 1995 Shires of Cobram, Yarrawonga, Numurkah and Nathalia, The average
> rates for these four Shires was 11.6% less then the Berrigan Shire.

> 1997 Shire of Moira which is the four shires amalgamated and privatised,
> The average rate was 21.7 less then the Berrigan shire.

> 2001 Shire of Moria The Average rate was 13.2% higher then the Berrigan
> Shire

> The very low figure for the Moira Shire in 97 was due to the state
> government of the day reducing the rates by $100 to every household.
> All the local government services were privatised and the councils left
> with no labour force to implement these services.  The loss of these
> jobs effected these towns very badly and the sale of the equipment was
> used to fund the redundancy payments.  The Moira Shire is moving towards
> taking back these privatised responsibilities so as they can get back a
> better standard of service like it once had.

Certainly, if privatisation is done naively, as it often is, there
usually are problems.  There's a good argument that for sufficiently
small scale activity (such as the rural councils significant to Max),
the vigour of intimate democratic representation and accountability
results in a better quality, vigorous, cheaper supervision than could be
bought for cash, meaning that the results are in fact more efficient
than you would get with privatisation.

This does not mean that privatisation is always a bad thing.
Privatisation is not responsible for the idiocy of its advocates, and
while Max makes (IMO) a good point, it is not to say privatisation is
always bad, only that it is frequently abused, and pursued more from
ideology than an objective view of real benefits.

Simon wrote

> There is currently no mechanism for direct contact between Federal and
> local govt.  Whitlam tried to introduce some constitutional change to
> have the local govt recognised but it failed because the libs sabotaged
> it as usual.  In any case, although I agree with the abolition of
> states, and some greater powers for local govt, I certainly do not
> advocate police, schools and health powers to go to local govt.

[note AJB's historical perspective, above]