Remember when Bob Katter said he wanted to split Queensland into two separate states? Well Australia’s most prominent historian, Geoffrey Blainey, agrees. Two years ago Blainey said that the Australian map hadn’t been changed since 1859 – well before anyone knew about how much resource wealth there was in the North. Read Blainey’s whole interview with the Cairns Post, here.
What’s even more interesting is that the majority of Cairns Post readers think North Queensland should be a separate state as well, see the results of this poll.
The IPA has been saying we should treat North Australia differently to Southern Australia for a while. Here’s an article from the IPA Review from August last year talking about Special Economic Zones in North Australia.
It turns out Honduras has been thinking along the same lines. Economist Paul Romer has helped the country develop the idea of a Charter City to encourage economic growth and development. The idea is to free the designated area from the old laws and start fresh. Here’s a summary on it from The Australian and here’s Paul Romer’s Charter Cities website.
Speaking of freeing areas of laws, Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll has flown into Australia from Britain to fight against the federal government’s carbon tax! Anglo American is the world’s fourth largest mining company – Ms Carroll said that ‘no other country in the world is proposing such an approach that would impact industry as much as the one here in Australia, and it threatens investment.’
We agree! In the next few months I’ll be visiting towns all over North Queensland to talk about the carbon tax and the consequences it will have on northern Australia. I’ll be bringing Professor Bob Carter with me – he’s he’s a geologist and environmental scientist, Adjunct Professor at James Cook University and the author of ‘Climate: the Counter-Consensus’ and ,
We’ll be visiting Mackay on the 27th April, Charters Towers on the 28th and Townsville on the 29th. If you’re interested in coming along send an email to Elizabeth Griffiths on egriffiths@ipa.org.au.
If you have any ideas for a new North please feel free to call me on (03) 9600 4744 or email me at jroskam@ipa.org.au . You can find out more about the IPA and what we do at www.ipa.org.au.