Australia's Social Problems (Was Re: [NSW] More Complaints on CityRail Southern Highlands) - now getting long and off-topic

["Al" <alpout@optusnet.com.au>]

"Bradley Torr" <truenorth@one.net.au.SPAMTRAP> wrote in message
01c0e8be$01d76ee0$255e65cb@default">news:01c0e8be$01d76ee0$255e65cb@default...
>
>
> Al <alpout@optusnet.com.au> wrote in article
> <3b144179$0$25471$7f31c96c@news01.syd.optusnet.com.au>...
>
> > Again, a social problem.  I reckon Australia would be a lot better off
> with 10
> > cities the size of Newcastle spread out than we are with 1 city the size
> of
> > Sydney.
>
> Of course it would! It simply does not make sense to have a country of over
> 7 million square kilometres (and while most of that is arid or semi-arid,
> large tracts of it are perfectly inhabitable) with around 60% of its
> population of 19 million crushed into 5 coastal cities. Besides which,
> having our growing population - both native-born and immigrants - spread
> over many cities rather than our largest two would greatly help the urban
> environment and infrastructure in those two largest cities cope.

Think about it.  Cities in the desert are perfect - at least from an
agricultural perspective -  as that land can't be used for much productive
food growth.  In the meantime, cities in Australia continue to grow, expand
and chew up valuable agricultural land, requiring more food from a smaller
area, hence more irrigation (leads to salination), pesticides (poisons by any
other name), intensive agriculture (soil erosion and degradation) and
fertilisers (which accumulate in waterways and encourage growth of such things
as blue-green algae).

The perfect example of this is Egypt.  Back in the pharaoh times agriculture
was done on the best land available (assisted by an annual flood which brought
fresh soil down the Nile, at the cost of what is now Ethiopia), while the
cities were built off the arable land (easy for them, the desert was only a
few kilometres away).  Egypt gradually fell under the European sway,
culminating in the 1960's, with the Aswan Dam being built (Soviet help).  Now
they can't feed themselves, more damage is being done on a daily basis to the
Pyramids than in previous centuries due to soil salination, and the Aswan Dam
has a useful life of about 30 years (max) before it silts up, and potentially
collapses.

> The only people who would benefit are the big end of town, which likes to
> have its human capital crowded into cities as it makes it cheaper to sell
> goods, create mass markets, organise its labour force, etc. It's all about
> economies of scale. It's easier and more profitable for a fast food chain
> to set up one restaurant in a city of 100,000 than build ten restaurants in
> ten towns of 10,000.

For all that, per capita, there's probably more fast food restaurants in the
big cities than in country towns anyway.


> I'm certainly not a communist - nor do I have much time for unproven and
> untried Marxist theories - but Marx and Engels were right when they wrote
> in "The Communist Manifesto":
>
> "The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of
> the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has
> agglomerated population, centralized the means of production, and has
> concentrated property in a few hands."
>
> (Of course, one of the first things Communist dictators have liked to do
> was to uproot their peasants and yeomen and dump them and their families
> into dismal concerte agro-industrial collectives and to concentrate the
> population in these artificial urban environments, thus contravening the
> Manifesto which supports a "gradual abolition of all the distinction
> between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace
> over the country." -- but that's probably getting a little too much
> off-topic. But at least them commies loved their railways!)

Not going to touch the politics, except to say that everyone has their good
points, and everyone has their bad points.  There is a fundamental flaw in
western democracies anyway.

> Now you know what's behind the forces which see our major metropolitan
> areas get bigger and bigger and bigger while rural and regional areas
> either decay or become 'dormitories' for the metropolitan regions, aided
> and abetted by governments blinkered by rationalist 'free market' doctrines
> which have completely abandoned decentralist policies post-Whitlam. And why
> the Endeavour services to the Southern Highlands get so packed, along with
> the Hume Highway in peak hours north of Moss Vale.
>
>  Regards
> BT

I think we're agreeing on similar things, just coming to them from different
angles.  It would make for an interesting pub chat.

Al