Productivity, eh? It's the best and most important thing in this wide, brown, sea-girt land of ours - or at least you'd assume so from the number of times it's held up by the government as a reason to do everything from reduce company tax (to increase productivity!) or cut Sunday penalty rates (to increase productivity!) or drug test the unemployed (to demonise the po??? I mean, encourage people to find a job and thereby increase productivity!).

Indeed, we have a whole Productivity Commission whose very job it is to examine the nation's productivity and see if it can't be made more ??? um, productiver?

And typically their words are taken as gospel by the government, since they happily tend to suggest things which align neatly with the wish-lists of predatory capitalism.

But there's one government report from April that you might not have heard the Treasurer trumpeting. It is the Transitioning Regional Economies Initial Report: Overview and Initial Findings.

The gist of the report is that areas in Australia currently dependent on things other than growing the service industry are in deep, irreversible trouble - most obviously areas which have hitherto relied upon manufacturing, but also increasingly-automated industries such as agriculture and mining.

So it's lucky that we're using "good debt" to make all these infrastructure projects, like inland rail and second NSW airports, eh? True, except that the PC have concluded that such things don't fix the problem. As they playfully put it, "Although government expenditure on projects can create short-term employment, it often does little to support transition and long-term sustainable growth in regions."

In fact, the authors go further to argue that regional pork-barrelling isn't just unhelpful: it's downright damaging, not least because claiming that government-supported projects will revitalise the region is nothing but a cruel hoax.

"Assistance that creates false expectations about the future success of an industry or economic activity can lead to confusion and reduce individuals' incentives to plan and adapt to changing circumstances," it reads. "Assistance to industries and regions has often been costly, ineffective, counter-productive, poorly targeted and inequitable."

So in short, the Productivity Commission reckons that if you're in an area that has structural barriers to greater productivity - like a mining town or an agricultural centre - then there's no point wasting money on you anymore. Your glory days are behind you, friend, and the Productivity Commission recommends that you get hold of some boxes.

"When people and businesses leave a regional community to take up better opportunities elsewhere, this often generates greater value and so increases the overall wellbeing of the population as a whole. However, such changes can have adverse effects on people left behind ??? It is a trend that cannot, nor should be, thwarted."

In other words: let Australia's smaller towns die.

Now, this is a bold idea, and one which might be tricky to officially endorse for a government which (a) is a partnership with a party that purports to be The Voice Of Regional Australia and (b) sports a deputy Prime Minister who rejoices in telling people that can't afford to buy a house in Sydney should just high-tail it to cheaper places like Armidale.

And the report's findings are not going to be endorsed by the current government because not throwing money at regional areas basically invalidates the very existence of the Nationals. It should be interesting to see if the final report in December takes a rather more circumspect view of the future economic viability of towns in marginal seats, especially as the possibility of a 2018 election peeks over the horizon.

But what does this report mean for those trying to work out where they might potentially live in the future? Well, for a start, this suggests that our already-crowded cities are likely to continue to enjoy a steady influx of people abandoning their evaporating towns for some of this sweet service-industry productivity which is apparently the only thing Australia has left.

It also means that the largest towns in an area will continue to absorb the smaller ones around it. Sorry, Joyce-inspired house buyers of Armidale: looks like you're all destined to be sucked into the gravitational vortex that is cosmopolitan Tamworth. Hope you like country music, because you're going to be hearing a lot of it.

And there's a glass-half-full interpretation, of course: there's a lot to be said for helping transform regional centres into vibrant, sustainable cities. If we're concluding that Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane are now getting too big to realistically repair then transforming Horsham and Townsville and Wagga Wagga into larger metropolitan hubs makes a certain amount of sense.

Then again, for all of the Productivity Commission's optimistic assumptions about just how mobile people in small towns are, it's not exactly easy to up stumps and move to the big smoke when your finances are tied up in a property you can't realistically hope to sell. And politically, how much voter goodwill is engendered by a slogan like "Hey, Cowra? You're expendable!"

In any case, you've got a while to mull the implications of the report over for yourself. After all, the government seem in no hurry to acknowledge it, much less discuss it or do anything about its findings, any time soon.

On the other hand ??? have you ever dreamt of owning your own ghost town? That possibility might be closer than you think!