Density and National Identity

Comments about national identity are bobbing up everywhere at present – it’s a perennial. A townplanner discusses the failure of decentralisation in Australia where 80 percent of our population lives in coastal cities: “There is no discussion of developing a distinctive Australian cultural identity, more achieveable in smaller towns than large, amorphous cities” and adds [post the 1980s]: “big ideas lost currency”…”too hard and too risky”….. as well as requiring significant injections of taxpayer funding when the idea of tax was going out of fashion as fast as the role of government in national development was rapidly declining. [“Is decentralisation worth keeping on the policy agenda?” by Stephen Bargwanna, The Canberra Times, 26 June 2021]