We need strengthened national and local governments... not states!

Regional governance can perhaps best be achieved through resource pooling and voluntary collaborations among neighbouring local communities through their local governments.

We already have about 50 voluntary regional organisations of councils (VROCs or ROCs) presently in place across most of Australia (refer http://www.alga.com.au/regionlink/vroclist.htm), which provide an excellent model for such arrangements.

Like with local government generally, these ROCs survive on shoestring budgets in the present system and could be expected to thrive as never before once they emerge from beyond the shadows of state governments.

National government functions, such as health care, education, policing and so on, could be facilitated through regional bodies like those already in place at the state level in our present system, with service delivery regions, especially in areas of life and death gravity such as healthcare and policing, designed according to functional imperatives rather than arbitrary boundaries.

With healthcare, for example, service delivery regions would be designed on the basis of settlement patterns, hospital locations, ambulance travel times etc. There would be regional court, policing and educational districts, water and environmental districts based on catchments, and so on.

So the buck should stop at national and local governments in a system more or less as I have described.