Thank NSW Labor for small thinking

Western Sydney, we get it.  Your state government is laughably incompetent.  It's unable to build the infrastructure and supply the services needed by a growing city.

The New South Wales government is too busy destroying its leaders to bother with boring roads and railways.  For years, the chief focus of the government has been mining the backbench for new premiers.  What are they on now?  Not Team B, or Team C;  it must be Team E, at least.

But give us back our federal election, please.

The anti-population growth policies of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are specifically calibrated to stoke western Sydney's disaffection with the failings of their ageing Labor government.  Asylum seekers, multiculturalism, sustainability, infrastructure, congestion, the lot -- it's all been dropped into the population bag.

That's right:  the anxieties of a few clustered electorates in NSW have inspired every major political party to abandon Australia's two-century-long goal of population growth.

It's no surprise one of the most prominent anti-population activists is Bob Carr, whose premiership kicked off Sydney's decline.  Mark Latham -- the self-styled voice of the west -- is annoyed at his old friend Gillard for treating his brethren as mugs.  Latham thinks the PM should be openly enthusiastic about slashing immigration.

And one of Gillard's first acts as Prime Minister was to fly David Bradbury, ALP member for the marginal Sydney seat of Lindsay, to Darwin so they both could join a navy exercise.  The two posed with handsome navy officers and played a spot-the-refugee-boat game for photographers.  Border security is a western Sydney issue, you see.

The phrase ''little Australia'' says it all:  little population, little economy and tiny aspirations.  The Coalition even wants to neuter one of our great institutions, the Productivity Commission -- admired and imitated internationally -- and recast it as the ''Productivity and Sustainability Commission'' to focus on limiting population growth.

Admittedly, they'll have to change its name, otherwise the commission would tell them Australia needs increased population growth for economic reasons -- we need labour, skilled and unskilled, to expand our prosperity, to keep inflation down, and to protect ourselves against future economic crises.

There's also a good moral argument for letting people from the developing world live and work in Australia, but an election is no place for moral arguments.

Late last year Kevin Rudd was concerned voter dissatisfaction with NSW Labor would undermine his re-election.  The 25 per cent massive swing to the Liberals in the Penrith state by-election in June apparently confirmed this view.

There's not a lot the federal government can do to fix western Sydney's congestion problem.

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