Slicker cities for city slickers

Federal and state governments seem increasingly disinterested in the needs of our capital cities and the people who live in them.

They have instead become enthralled by the myths of our political landscape.

Media grabs and political sound grabs that focus on struggling small businesses, or rural and regional Australia, or bank bashing and the like are the fast food of today's politics.

Regional centres with doubtful futures because old industries have closed have been promised huge welfare packages, funded by the sale of assets like Telstra, Qantas or the Commonwealth Bank.

Those assets were built on the back of the growing economies of cities, but their proceeds are being freely distributed to economies with much less viable futures and few politicians have been honest enough to point that out.

There are Ministries devoted to Regional Services (two, counting the titles of John Anderson and Ian MacDonald) , Trade (always to the National Party, assuming that trade can only be farm or quarry exports, not services), to Small Business, Resources, Agriculture, Fishing and Forestries, the Territories, and to again Forestry (which also gets two mentions including the portfolios of Warren Truss and Wilson Tuckey) - not counting the various Parliamentary Secretaries also attached to these portfolios.

But there is not one concerned with coordinating the focus nor the budget for the development of vital infrastructure in our major cities.

Imagine the combined economic contribution made by all Australian capital cities to our economic welfare and contrast that with the minor scale of national political or cultural effort which is focussed on nurturing and growing it.

Is it so important that cities like Brisbane receive a better deal?

After all, if you listen to many politicians, the 'big end of town' can look after itself. In fact, that is precisely what it has had to do, but has this been successful?

In Brisbane we face obvious symptoms of decline: there is rising transport congestion, worsening air quality, issues of urban sprawl, rising urban crime, a drug problem which is increasingly evident and too much empty office space and empty shops.

But the problems of city are harder to identify than that of the rural areas - they are in a sense hidden by the scale of the city while the symptoms of rural decline are obvious and identifiable.