I have heard people say that Australia is a developed country.
And, while it is true that in the 230-odd years since colonisation began, the nation has certainly come a long way, the recent highway and rail outages in outback South Australia demonstrated we still have a long way to go until we can truly count ourselves as a first world country.
As Dorothea Mackellar famously said, Australia is a country of droughts and flooding rains.
And while is seems that we are more used to the former than the latter, it is well worth remembering that when the heavens open in the outback, they truly can be flooding rains.
Earlier this month, the people who lived in the north and west of the country looked on in disbelief as one rain event brought three quarters of the country to the brink of starvation because the road and rail network that carries freight to the 19 per cent of the population that dares to live away from the the safety and the convenience of the east coast was cut for more than a week.
What does it say about a country as wealthy and as progressive as Australia that it does not have a viable alternative for the transport of essential goods around the nation after a little bit of rain?
For me, it says that we, the few who live west of the Dividing Range, are out of sight and out of mind for the people who are supposedly in charge of ensuring the continued advancement of our great nation.
Politicians of all persuasions have continually ignored the needs of inland Australia, being too occupied with the pork barrelling and pocket pissing that will keep them in a job.
The prolonged closure of the Stuart Highway and the subsequent shambles that followed with the delays in reestablishing essential supply lines was a political gift.
Yet our politicians chose to ignore this gift horse completely.
Instead of taking the opportunity to pledge support to our woefully underdeveloped national infrastructure, to ensure the continued prosperity and development of country, politicians did nothing.
With representatives like that, Australia will continue to be an under-developed nation, a nation of "haves" and "have nots" - where some enjoy the benefits of bitumen roads, full supermarket shelves and easy access to essential services and the rest of us are condemned to live in a third world country because we're out of sight and out of mind.
And our second rate transport network is just another insult in the long line of substandard services that we are forced to tolerate.
Education, health, childcare and telecommunications in the interior of Australia are of a consistently poorer standard than those that our city counterparts receive.
Regional Australia is faced with a chicken and egg scenario - people won't move to the regions unless they have access to infrastructure and services.
Yet these things are not provided by Government until there is a population base to make it "worth the investment".
It is time that the politicians acknowledge they are running a country - not a business.
Running a country means that you need to have a plan to grow and develop the nation so that there is a minimum standard of services provided to everyone, a minimum standard of living that is available to everyone, regardless of where they live.
That is literally their job.
And yet it seems that government after government has failed spectacularly.
While I understand the need to ensure that each and every public dollar is spent wisely and, in some cases, there is much to be gained from privatisation, private investment and other free market mechanisms, sometimes the only return on investment that needs to be measured is the improvement in the lives of the people, and that should be the only ROI measurement that really matters.