I am not a supporter of the big is necessarily better notion and a Tamworth population increase to 100,000 represents a lot of State and Federal government infrastructure money which we are unlikely to see from the current Premier for Sydney and Minister for Stadiums or the dysfunctional Federal government. 

Tamworth has a raft of limitations the main being current infrastructure such as water, water storages, drought, road, transport, health, education etc. However it is quite clear that marginal seats derive the most government attention of which Tamworth is not. As a previously ardent supporter of The Nationals for more than two decades, longer than some of the clueless MP’s that now rule our State, it came as a great personal disappointment that that party and its paid-for politicians have not fulfilled the promises and undertakings it made to the fine people of rural and coastal NSW over the last 7 years, particularly at the watershed 2011 NSW State election.

 However when you objectively dissect NSW politics from as far back as Premiers Wran, Unsworth, Greiner, Fahey, Carr, Iemma, Rees, Kenneally, O’Farrell, Baird, Berejiklian, you glimpse that we haven’t seen too many willing to enhance and preserve the integrity of rural/coastal NSW and wishing to reverse decades of service cuts, redundancies and ultimately population drift to metropolitan NSW or elsewhere.

I am an avid supporter of fair dinkum decentralisation policies that aid the viability and sustainability of rural NSW. Sadly and all too frequently we get Governments of both colours that remain welded to metropolitan population centres such as Sydney and if we get anything at all and I have the relocation of the Commonwealth Government’s AVPMA in mind, the relocation has been so ham-fisted, so appallingly managed, the agency represents a poor picture of its former self and unlikely to effectively deliver the services required by its stakeholders.

In Tamworth we see hundreds of public sector redundancies throughout a host of public service agencies both State and Federal back to the 1980’s.  More recently we see one of Tamworth’s previously biggest employers, the former Peel Cunningham County Council now Essential Energy being emaciated before our eyes an organisation that less than four years ago had our local State MP’s going on the record as having “saved” it and allegedly gleaned a $6 billion cash promise to boot, wherever that money is. I can even recall an evidently empty promise made to this electorate by the current State MP that he would cross the floor “if his coalition colleagues were to endorse any cuts to public service jobs in the Tamworth Electorate”. 

Public Sector jobs are equally as important to the economies of rural NSW as private jobs. Where is the NSW government looking to mitigate the effects of metropolitan over-population by ameliorating rural population decline by encouraging relocation to rural NSW? By providing zonal taxation incentives to businesses west of the Great Dividing Range, payroll tax cuts, encouraging businesses currently located in metropolitan Sydney to relocate. Stopping the death by 1,000 cuts of the public service and Essential Energy, by ending the preposterous privatisation agenda of city-centric Liberals. More investment in vocational education –  TAFE rather than preparing to flog it off, cutting the record TAFE course fees to encourage enrolments by rural kids. 

In 2011 the incumbent State government promised $7,000 to people willing to move to rural NSW by 2015 it was gone. With a NSW State general election less than a year away, we can confidently stand by for a range of funding announcements, electoral bribes masquerading as investments by the local member and the deputy Premier of Sydney and I believe many electors will consider this desperation entirely disingenuous.  

After 7 years with a member who apparently had a seat at the table of Government, the power to fix the woes of our World, will sadly leave many rural NSW people and rural NSW in a poorer position than how they found it, but importantly no effective decentralisation policy.

Mark Rodda

Tamworth