A property investment expert, Terry Ryder, said in The Weekend Advertiser, Wagga was (currently) the nation's strongest boom town.

Years of reporting these predictions from business, government, tertiary studies and reports makes hardened journalists sceptical of their assessment, but he makes sense.

What Ryder did say, though, was that investors - and unfortunately it must be added, governments at state and federal levels - do under-rate regional centres.

Ryder was also right when he noted there were a lot of advantages - not only for investors like him but for manufacturers, businesses and governments on all fronts - to avoid the capital cities.

This is where, especially with a council election now just a few weeks away, the city could do with the initiative from its council that Dubbo had in the seventies.

Over a decade, led by two mayors who were polls apart politically, Ken Marshall and Norm Cox, Dubbo took off.

Marshall began a concept of enticing the regional airline, Airlines of NSW, to provide a Fokker Friendship each year to bring from Sydney for several days investors, bankers, government department heads, manufacturing bodies and other business leaders to see the possibilities Dubbo offered.

It worked. It was the spur on which the city advanced.

That included, too, the birth of the great Western Plains Zoo.

Many small manufacturing businesses who uprooted from Sydney are still there.

This ought to be the job our governments and councils  are doing all the time if regional Australia is ever to realise its potential.

In regional Australia's case, as Fairfax columnist and businessman, Harold Mitchell, keeps saying, it's feeding and supplying Asia that is our oyster.

It won't happen, of course, while the current attitude of our political leaders persists.

It was thoughtfully put forward by the shadow federal assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh, in an article by The Canberra Times journalist, Tony Wright, in which he quoted Leigh: " ... it doesn't help that people often see their parliamentarians on the television shouting, accusing one another of lying or otherwise doing things for which most parents would send their children to the naughty corner".

It was, said Leigh (who holds one of the two lower house Canberra seats), time "to look again at the ancient concept of agape"; that politicians need to return to a gentler time when respect and acknowledgement for those on the other side was given.

Wright instanced Sir Robert Menzies comments the night Labor's legendary "light on the hill" Ben Chifley died: "Although we were political opponents, he was a great friend of mine, and of yours, and a fine Australian".

Like conservative PM, Arthur Fadden, having lost the prime ministership in 1941 to Labor's John Curtin: "I am passing the reins to the greatest figure in public life, and the 'best and fairest opponent, of my lifetime".

That's the way it should be; we are, or should be, all in this desire for a better society together.