I like being an Australian.

I think things work well when we work together as Australians.

We’ve seen this in war time, at times of national disasters, at times of global economic crisis – when we as Australians work together we work best.

But it wasn’t always so. When the “Mother Country” decided to send her cast-offs to the end of the earth we ended up with a series of separately founded states.

Each had its own version of laws, its own administrative system and we ended up with a grab bag of rail gauges, for instance, that were a potent symbol of the limits of this approach and a barrier to us doing many things together.

But in the late 19^th Century, the visionary politicians of the day saw that this was stupid and self defeating and nutted out a deal by which we ceased to be a continent of New South Welshmen, Victorians, South Australians, West Australians, Queenslanders, Tasmanians and became Australians.

This was not an easy deal and we have spent more than 100 years gradually making it better and trying to make us more homogeneous as Australians; over those 100 years we have come to think of ourselves first and foremost as Australians.

How dare you try to reverse this long-fought-for process by demanding that the states go back to collecting their own Income Tax; re-enforcing and exaggerating their need to act as individual states and leading to a new set of differentials where states may have different tax rates, setting up a new era of self-defeating competition.

You are playing games with the identity and well-being of Australia for your own political ends, a game that Motormouth Morrison refers to as “calling their bluff” as though we’re all in some nasty card game.

Australians keep telling you what they want: they want a decent public medical scheme, they want first-class education and research, they want a decent society that looks after all its citizens, a society not just seen as a market place to be exploited; they expect you to manage the economy to get those things, not welsh on providing them.

If you and your mob are too gutless or ideologically limited to raise the money for the community to get those things then you should get out of the way.

What we don’t need are individual states scrabbling around like chooks in a henhouse.

We need to minimise the effect of states on our national well-being; it would be good to get rid of the states as so-called autonomous entities and set up regional locations as enhanced centres of administration supervised by elected citizen representatives.

Malcolm, you are beginning to make as big a mess of running the country as you did in running the NBN where you went for the cheap, cobbled together bits and pieces approach, which has not saved time and certainly not saved money.

We were headed for an RR system, you gave us a VW and we all know we can’t trust them anymore.

We need to be a forward-looking country concerned with the long-term future in which we are cohesive, strong and generous.

We do not need to be “reformed” backwards.

You are fast becoming the third worst Conservative leader in living memory.

A pox on your games!