IT WAS vintage Roger Fletcher as he called for the abolition of State Governments, the full sale of Telstra, a super highway west across the Blue Mountains from Sydney, the abolition of payroll tax for bush employers and a new deal for Australia's under-privileged.
Mr Fletcher launched a volley of verbal shots at some of the problems he and his supporters have identified as the major causes of the economic and social decay across much of rural and regional Australia during a speech to a NSW Farm Writers Association lunch in Sydney last Friday.
The core of the problem, as Mr Fletcher sees it, are the politicians and bureaucrats who continually use short-term fixes and Band-aids to treat the symptoms of a much bigger underlying disease sapping the life out of much of the bush.
But their blinkered attitude won't change until they are shown long-term strategies to cure the bush's major ills, Mr Fletcher said.
He and his team of supporters (formed late last year) are now fine-tuning some big-ticket reforms in key areas such as health, education and rural infrastructure as the start of their campaign to force politicians and governments to take a much longer-term view of the policies and planning needed for a sustained recovery across inland Australia.
Dubbo-based Mr Fletcher, who operates Australia's largest sheepmeat processing and export business and employs about 700 people, started publicly agitating early last November for a blueprint for development and reform in what he sees as the largely forgotten and ignored people and industries west of the Blue Mountains.
He supports the full sale of Telstra providing all the proceeds (probably in excess of $30 billion) are used for building new major infrastructure in the bush, notably roads (starting with a super highway from Sydney west across the Great Divide), rail upgrading and new power-generating capacity.
Mr Fletcher said the pot of gold from selling Telstra should be doubled through borrowings to provide a $60 billion fund to build the essential new infrastructure identified by a proper long-term planning process.
He said much of Australia's expensive law and order and health problems could be traced to the bottom 20 per cent of Australian society who were being badly failed by the education, health, welfare and political
systems.
Unskilled jobs were being exported with our raw materials such as wool, slaughter sheep and minerals because Australian industries couldn't compete with low-cost or subsidised manufacturing in countries such as China, India and the Middle East.
For example, he said, Australia now had only three topmaking plants due to China's domination of raw wool purchases (and the industry beyond the farm gate).
China could process wool for the same total labour cost as Australian mill owners paid in payroll taxes.
So the wool processing industry was now controlled by a country interested only in "hocking" product while jobs had been lost in Australian country towns.
This loss of jobs hits hardest at the bottom 20pc of the workforce, adding to their low self-worth which in turn increased the risk of crime, violence and expensive welfare dependence.
He said the education and social welfare systems weren't properly tackling the job of encouraging and nurturing the children of this under-privileged class, the consequences of which were costing the rest of society billions of dollars a year.
There were more than 100 organisations in Dubbo alone with their fingers in the social welfare pie and all trying to get money.
Mr Fletcher said State Governments should be axed to end the costly blurring of funding and management responsibilities across a wide range of areas such as health care, roads and education.
Local councils would need to be enlarged and more people elected to them "who knew what they were doing" if the States were abolished.
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