It might well be a case of taking tongue-in-cheek to places never been known.
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Perhaps that is the only sensible take possible on former Wodonga councillor Tim Quilty's maiden speech to the Victorian Parliament.
The new member for Northern Victoria certainly would have got some to take notice of his views, which seemed equal parts bizarre and clear-headed.
The strange bit, of course, is his rumination that it was time for regional areas to split from the big smoke to form their own state.
Now, most debate about our triple-tier of government focuses on the need to simplify the whole shebang by getting rid of one of them, most commonly the states.
It is here though that the real crux of his "proposal" is surely rooted.
And that is, Wodonga would be the regional state capital of a place "governed by people who actually know about the community they live in".
It's never going to happen. Mr Quilty isn't going to ever get to witness such a split, the Murray River and in particular Wodonga is never going to be the home of a new Parliament house.
The point of it all though appears to be reminding the political power brokers in Victoria that the time has come to stop ignoring rural and regional Victoria.
That is clearly a message aimed directly at the Andrews Labor government, but also serves to put on notice the Coalition, for they haven't exactly bathed the North East in funding during their now (very) occasional terms in power.
Mr Quilty's is a plaintive plea for government to actually acknowledge that the people of the regions, but especially the north, deserve to have their voices heard.
Some in the regions do. But Bendigo and Ballarat and Geelong, political swing-zones that regularly get primed with pork barreling, don't really count.
The North East does, yet year-after-year is treated with contempt.
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