2 September

One of the most glaring symptoms of the problem with all Western cultures is their total neglect of regional life. You only need to look at the highway system to see it. Tens of billions spent creating smooth multi-lane highways for thousands of km, up and down the coast. The road to the West is an absolute fucking disgrace by comparison. The furthest any investment gets is the Blue Mountains, which is really still outer Sydney. And the Blue Mountains highway is a tourist drive, not a highway, for Sydney folk. The UK’s new PM Andy Burnham spoke this week of the gutting of community life in smaller centres, in the UK. Exactly the same thing happened here. I’ve posted about how regional areas try to fight this by setting themselves up as some rival ‘regional’ life. I think that’s a terrible mistake, doomed to fail. As the Chinese show us, country life is just city life. Cities invented the country, to extract food and resources. What’s needed is to re-integrate regional life into city life, where it came from. As the Chinese do, with massive investment. To create one culture, not two. Not town and country. Just Australia. One where you can live anywhere, not just huddled on a coast that will be underwater in a few generations anyway.