But you can't take the concerned Canberran out of the boy, and while in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Glasgow my dear little home metropolis in the Antipodes was always on my mind. Is there a sense in which every overseas trip we thinking Canberrans take is or could be a kind of de-facto fact-finding mission on Canberra's behalf?

Back to this stimulating idea in just a moment after reporting that the thought has been kindled by a travel story this week in The Canberra Times.

This columnist's ears pricked up at a story that reported "It's been revealed that planning minister Mick Gentleman's trip to North America last year cost taxpayers $70,538."

In 2016 Mr Gentleman with staff and public servants, foxtrotted to some North American cities. Everywhere they went light rail was uppermost in their minds and investigations.

Was the $70,538 well and necessarily spent? Seething bean counters already are writing letters to the editor.

Whatever the truth in this instance it is always true that travel broadens and deepens receptive minds. And so I evangelise that we should insist that our elected representatives do lots of travelling. We should make them do it. They will be better value for our money if world travel is enabled to work its sensitising, mind-widening magic on them.

But it must be overseas travel. Bec Cody MLA's travels down the coast to Sussex Inlet to investigate urinals have done nothing to assist the conversation of mankind.

Under my proposal, instead of hounding politicians about any taxpayer-funded travels they take we would hound those that, wilfully, selfishly, stay at home and don't travel enough.

We would use FOI to name and shame those MLAs who have remained far too bogged down at home, leaving them as dull, ignorant and insular as mud-sucking carp that think their corner of the Jerrabomberra Wetlands is the whole world.

We would name and shame those politicians who somehow have never felt inclined to make a beeline for all those cities that everyone must go to (New York, say, Saint Petersburg, Venice and Shanghai) if they are to be well-rounded citizens of the world. Has Bec Cody been to St Petersburg? Her preoccupation with the trivial issue of tiles in a country lavatory hints that she needs to be introduced to life's bigger pictures and bigger places so that she can begin to be a more worldly servant of the people of Murrumbidgee.

It is time to make all of our MLAs travel, and at our expense. You can tell from what they burble about in and around the Assembly that they are preoccupied with the parochial and the trivial, with roads, gutters, dog licences, rates. For the sake of the standard of public conversation in the ACT every one of them should often, their protests ignored ("Please don't make me go to Venice. Can't I stay here? It's a jungle out there. All those foreigners. If I must go somewhere can't I just go to Sussex Inlet?") be bundled aboard Qantas flights to the big wide world.

I feel this acutely because I travel a bit to Scandinavia where nations and their cities are famously progressive and are bristling with new ideas for us. So for example in Norway I learned a lot about Bergen's blissful experience of light rail. In all Scandinavian cities we see generous deployments of fine public art that put Canberra's public art philistinism to shame.

We could have an annual traveller's ideasfest at which Canberra's potentates meet and listen attentively to those of us who have come home from travels with lots of lovely ideas in our mental luggage.

At this event poorly-travelled MLAs (yet to go anywhere further away than Sussex Inlet) would listen, enthralled, to our tales of faraway places with strange-sounding names. They'd hear how Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Popocatepetl, Helsinki, Reykjavik, Venice, Shanghai, St Petersburg have stolen our hearts away.