Even the suburbanites need a train to the city when you have only a few motorways, most with eye-watering tolls (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane) where missing some toll payments could cost you very expensive fines and even jail time (VIC and QLD criminal justice system enforces private road tolls).
Sure, but suburbanites could vote in a party on a platform of removing those tolls (as happened here in BC/Vancouver)
Ohh the tollways are privately operated on long agreements with Transurban with guaranteed annual increases of 4%. The government of NSW had a hard enough time negotiating a cap on tolls.
The other benefit is the NSW senate is elected at large by the whole state through PR while the VIC senate is elected from eight regions, which are still reflective of population (five are metropolitan). That reduces the US issue of over representing low-population rural at the expense of urban.
Similarly, Canada only has a senate at the federal level which (unlike the Australian federal and US senates) doesn’t have equal representation for provinces (but a strong eastern and urban province bias with ON and QC each having 24 senators while most get only 6 and NB and NS have 10 each).
Australia only has a 'senate' at the Federal level. As I said, the state governments all have to have the confidence of metropolitan voters, which is why all but Tas and Qld are Labor states.
So what are the upper houses in the state legislatures if they’re not senates? QLD is a weird state politically but I don’t quite get why. Is the rural population in QLD more significant relative to the SEQ urban population compared to other states (especially NSW where even Libs are pro-transit)?