What’s a fair share?
It has always been a common wisdom that the Far North is not getting it’s “fair share” when it comes to government funding. Queensland Economy Watch has posted on Huge regional disparities in Qld Government capital spending per capita
The surprise for many here would be that SEQ does not appear after all to be a villainous suck-hole draining the wealth from our fabulous regions. However capital expenditure is always going to be lumpy and what is really needed is more transparency around this as Gene points out in that post.
Bill Cummings has also been reported in local media this week on the subject. There is a report posted last year at Cummings Economics: Queensland State Budget 2016-17 Capital Expenditure by Region (pdf)
I have a couple of problems with this typically agenda driven report. Given that regional capex numbers are likely to be lumpy it doesn’t really help to provide analysis on a selected base year even if the time frame is longer. There are however some good points made.
It would be nice to have much better data over a more extended period. However a quick observation on what is easily available here would be that if FNQ is not getting a “fair share” it is more likely to be because it is going to other regions and not down some Brisbane gurgle hole.
cairnseconomy 
Thanks for linking to my post Mark. Yes good point about the importance of doing the comparison over a longer period. I’ll have a look at how far back the breakdown by region goes and see what I can do.
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