secession movement

Opinion by Greg Ray The biggest mistake Newcastle ever made was in 1967 when its voters helped kill the idea of Northern NSW seceding from the Sydney-dominated south. After decades of agitation and a huge push, the so-called “Northern Separation Movement” had managed to force a formal referendum on the issue. People in the north of the state had brought the issue up repeatedly from the time that Queensland split from NSW. Their complaint was and has always been the same: that the Sydney-based government extracts far more from regional areas than it puts back, that…