If Tony Abbott thinks remote communities aren't viable, he can start with Tasmania

Jack Waterford

Tony Abbott has done all Australians a favour by raising the question of the economical viability of remote communities. He is surely right to wonder if we can continue to spend large sums of money in areas where there are no real jobs, and little in the prospects of finding them. People, it seems, are going to have to move to where the work is.

Because he was dealing with a question about the defunding of Aboriginal outstations, there were some who drew the conclusion that he was confining himself to their situation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Indeed he was privileging Aboriginal Australians, as John Howard did before with the Aboriginal intervention, with a scheme he means to make of general application. It's a great idea, so why should not our first people be the first to know, or to experience the benefit. 

The proposal is about saving future generations from the unconscionable burden of intergenerational theft, Labor's debt and deficit nightmare and the churlish refusal of senators to adopt last year's budget.

As luck has it, it may emerge that Abbott will not be discriminating in favour of Aboriginal communities as he develops his plan to make everyone, and everything and everywhere viable. That's because there are bigger targets, as a result of which they may have to wait their turn.

As we shift people away from unviable areas and communities, we can flog the vacated real estate, perhaps to Tonga. Or Kiribati, sinking into the ocean. Or New Zealand, China, the United States, perhaps even to Israel or the Islamic State.

This could solve our foreign debt problems for all time, and put a smile on every face. Let others face the problem of making such areas viable.

The whole of Tasmania might be a good start. The US was able to purchase Alaska from Russia for $US7 million or so in 1867. Many Americans thought it a very poor deal, and Alaska became known as Seward's folly, after the man who negotiated the deal.

One would think that Tasmania should be worth at least that, perhaps more given the scenic beauties around Smithton. Tasmania is a non-stop drain on the national economy. It was before federation and has been ever since, its citizens drawing from other Australian taxpayers more than twice as much as they put in.

I have heard any number of explanations about how, if Australians invested in this or that Tasmanian venture or panacea from hydroelectricity to opium, the state will eventually become viable, but nothing ever seems to come to much, other than a pyre of mainland banknotes.

Some think that its best hope lies in wilderness tourism. That is becoming a reality, and not only from the sharp decline in viable industry, but also in the number of Deliverance-set inhabitants in the hinterlands. 

It may well be that the Commonwealth Department of Finance, in arranging the asset sale, could offer inhabitants of the island the choice to stay if they wanted. Given the way that hope, and faith, springs eternal in the Tasmanian breast, it may be that some will want to throw in their lot with their new landlords, whoever they might be. We should let them, perhaps with a citizen-redundancy that would be off our books in only a few years.

Naturally, once the sale was completed, we would close down the air services to Devonport and Hobart, and the Spirit of Tasmania ferry service. This would not be from want of neighbourliness, but on sheer economic grounds only, since both have long been unviable. Refugee boat people could take their chances in the Bass Strait or Tasman Sea, though any who struggled through would have to run the risk of being shot, and interned on Flinders Island, by our Volkspolizei, as Border Command is soon to be renamed. 

An advantage of starting with Tasmania is that mere divestment would save Australian taxpayers a fortune in parliamentary salaries, as the unemployment benefit seems to be called in that state. As an "original" state, Tasmania insisted that it have a minimum representation in each chamber of the federal parliament, with the result that it has about three times as many representatives in parliament than the folk of the ACT, who do actually contribute much more to the Commonwealth piggy bank than they take out. But Tasmania also has a full-blown state government and local government structure, with the consequence that in most Tasmanian families there is at least one, sometimes two, members of a legislature.

The temptation to move from Tasmania straight to a walk-in walk-out sale of South Australia should be resisted. That state is also unviable, with or without wine or submarines, or even a saltwater canal to Lake Eyre. That gives it a place in the queue, but when it comes to saving billions, and closing down unviable communities and subsidised enterprise it must take its turn.

That would be in the queue behind the two major urban centres of the Northern Territory. Each swallows up far more in federal government cash per head of population than ever has been sighted by individuals living in far smaller Aboriginal communities. Indeed even Tasmania's drag on the fiscus is mild compared with the giant sucking noises from Darwin.

One might sometimes get the impression from federal politicians, or advocates from the Institute of Public Affairs, that the real sinks of endless subsidy are in Aboriginal settlements.  

A Darwin or an Alice Springs can trump the biggest, or the smallest, Aboriginal settlement any old day of the week. Indeed the more a Territorian bitches about Canberra, or Southerners, of "bludgers" and  of "real people", the more likely it is that he is some fairly recent Territory blow-in, like its current Chief Minister, a former Canberra-based public servant.

It is hard to conceive of the size of the mountain of taxpayer-sourced dollars coming in, compared with the hillocks of outputs coming out. Mining this pile of money, and intercepting as much as possible from Aboriginal communities, is the principal - arguably the only - industry for white folk in the NT.

A Darwin, indeed, is largely able to exist at all only by stealing its own generous tribute from every dollar coming in for the benefit of Aboriginal Australians. What is not commandeered by its absurd political class (bearing an amazing resemblance to Tasmania's) is largely spent on fine schools and health services in the well-heeled suburbs. Not on Aboriginal people, whose living conditions, remoteness and lack of access to facilities are the source of the largesse, but for the families of provider class. The children of the state and federal public servants, service personnel, and of the army of urgers, lobbyists, providorist, Toyota salespeople and experts do very nicely, on average incomes matching those in Canberra.

For political reasons, neither side of politics elsewhere in Australia seems to mind very much. I used to joke that a good many economic theories about the viability of remote rural settlements, even white ones, seemed to depend on the idea that one could make an economy if everyone took in someone else's washing.

It is more easy to agonise about whether and for how long we can subsidise the lifestyles of the local Aboriginal populations. Some think that their future lies in moving, voluntarily or by pressure of hunger to the big cities, where, apparently, there is work galore for unskilled folk who want it.

There's an element of special perversity about this in the Northern Territory given that, until the late 1960s, Darwin and Alice Springs were under curfew for Aborigines. No black faces were allowed in the city limits between sundown and dawn. Now, apparently, it is to be reversed, with the land outside the city to be reserved for trains carrying federal funds to Darwin, and, possibly, iron ore and manganese to China and Japan. A much more viable outcome, not least for the companies whose contributions support the fine work of the IPA.

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