GET OFF THE ROAD

What a bunch of blinkered, self-centred whingers. What a bunch of visionaries. What a bunch of party hacks.

The Federal Government is going to spend twelve billion dollars to build a dual-carriageway road from Melbourne through Sydney to Brisbane. A safer and more streamlined interstate transport system.

And the jerks in Melbourne are already bleating. We are ONLY getting about one and a half billion dollars. They conveniently forget the fact that the State Labor Government dudded us for nearly half a billion dollars because they went back on an election promise and decided to put a toll on the Scoresby Freeway.

Do they think we are stupid? I have seen Transport Minister Peter Batchelor posturing on the TV News and I am increasingly starting to think that his most imaginative moment in politics was when he tried to fix the Nunawadding by-election.

These billions of dollars are going to widen the Calder Highway, build the Deer Park by-pass, finish more than 100 kilometres of dual carriageway between Melbourne and Sydney and finally build the Geelong bypass. People in Geelong are rejoicing that the sound of semi-trailers won’t be shaking them in their beds.

And it will save lives on our roads.

All we get from the nit-picking, whingeing little parochial pollies on places like Spring Street is negativity. Pathetic, point-scoring politics.

It all brings it home to me yet again that this country was founded on a misconception. We are the Commonwealth of Australia. A rag-tag collection of states where 400,000 people in Tasmania have as much clout in The Senate as Victoria or New South Wales.

We don’t need state governments. Britain has sixty-seventy million people and they don’t have states or provincial governments.

We need a strong centralized government and stronger local councils. All these other parochial posturers should be shown the door.

Don’t they ever think nationally? Don’t they ever think outside their balliwick and dream of things for the good of the whole country?

We are an island nation at the bottom of the world with only twenty million people. Is a safe, divided highway – all the way from Melbourne to Brisbane – such a crime?

Tuesday, June 8, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004