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Economics group ACIL Tasman looked at the amount sent east in the excise duty charged on petrol and diesel, the cost of luxury car tax on vehicles worth more than $57,100, and customs duties paid on motor vehicles for the State. It also calculated the amount of GST paid on petrol, and GST for new cars and fleet vehicles. In total the revenue heading from those sources to the Federal Government works out at approximately $2 billion a year. But when the amount transferred back to WA for road funding is considered, the gap is substantial.

ACIL Tasman estimated that only 33 cents in every dollar raised in federal road-related taxes from WA is returned to the state for road projects, mostly in grants to local government or in specific funding, like that for Black Spot projects. This leaves the state and local governments picking up the rest of the tab to build, maintain and repair the 175,000km of roads in WA.

What is the main idea?

RAC Head of Member Advocacy Matt Brown said the report found that an additional billion dollars that was collected from road users by the State Government was reinvested in the network. But this only looked at direct charges, such as registration fees, and didn't reflect the real economic gain to the government from an effective road system.

'There is enormous additional economic benefit from the road network,' he said. 'Governments in general aren't investing enough in the road network, and that is particularly emphasised with Canberra getting the better part of $2billion directly from WA motorists and only returning 33 cents in the dollar. When you look at the challenges of our road network compared to other states, and you look at the size of our state, it is simply unsustainable for Canberra to refuse to increase the proportion of motoring taxes they actually return to WA in road funding.'

What is the main idea?

The funding collected from Western Australia out of road-related taxes will hit an estimated $3 billion this year, the ACIL Tasman report says, and by 2014- 15, it will be close to $3.5 billion. Over that time expenditure on roads in WA is projected to fall, not rise.

The picture worsens when you consider that a major source of federal funding for the 126,000 km of local roads could vanish within two years. About 80 per cent of Australia's roads are owned and maintained by local governments, paid for in part by property taxes raised by councils, but also through federal grants.

WA Local Government Association President Mayor Troy Pickard estimated about 27 per cent of the funding for local government roads comes from the Federal Government, through the Roads to Recovery program and other grants. But the Roads to Recovery money is due to run out when the program ends in 2014, leaving many routes that are already under-funded in a worse state.

'There are situations across Weste Australia where local roads need to be upgraded and incur higher maintenance costs in order to support the development of industries, including a range of mining and agricultural activities,' Mr Pickard said. 'Local governments believe that there is an additional role for the Federal Government to financially support the upgrade of regionally important local roads to enable this economic development to occur.'

What is the main idea?

Mr Pickard said this funding should be continued and indexed, so the funds reflect the real cost of building and maintaining the road network. 'Local governments recognise that in many areas there is a gap between expenditure on local roads and the lifecycle cost of maintaining those roads,· he said. 'Unless this gap is addressed, the quality of local government roads will decline.'

While the Federal Government promises it will put more money into WA infrastructure in the next few years, this will not come from the $2 billion of road-related taxes identified in the ACIL report.

Instead, the Commonwealth contribution to projects such as Gateway WA - the upgrade to the area around the airports, including Tonkin Highway - will be paid for out of a separate pool of money, called the Regional Infrastructure Fund, which the Federal Government plans to build with revenue from the proposed Minerals Resource Rent Tax.

The mining tax, which has not yet been voted on in Federal Parliament, is due to start 1 July next year. But even this promised pool of cash has been clouded by tense political relations.

The Federal Government has said that while the money for Gateway WA will be there regardless of recent moves by WA to increase its royalty taxes, other infrastructure funding may be in doubt as the state jostles for a better slice of revenue.

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In the early 1980s, I stumbled on a finding t at fascinated me. People who reported having a traumatic experience and kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who talked openly. If you asked people to write about their secrets, would their health improve? The answer, I discovered, was yes.

As part of this work, we developed a computer program to analyse the language people used when they wrote about traumas. We made numerous discoveries using this tool. However, our most striking discovery was not about the content of people's writing but the style. In particular, we found that the use of pronouns mattered enormously. The more people changed from using first-person singular pronouns (I, me) to using other pronouns (we, you), the better their health became. Their word usereflected their psychological state.

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What do I mean by style? In any given sentence, there are two basic types of word. The first is content words, which provide meaning. These include nouns (table, uncle), verbs (to love, to walk), adjectives (blue, mouthwatering) and adverbs (sadly, hungrily).The other type are 'function' words. These serve quieter, supporting roles - connecting, shaping and organising the content words. They are what determines style.

Function words include pronouns (I, she), articles (a, an), prepositions (up, with), auxiliary verbs (is, don't), negations (no, never), conjunctions (but, and), quantifiers (few, most) and common adverbs (very, really). By themselves, they don't have much meaning. Whereas a content word such as 'table' can trigger an image in everyone's mind, try to imagine 'that' or 'really'.

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Function words are psychologically very revealing. They are used at high rates, while also being short and hard to detect. They are processed in the brain differently from content words. And, critically, they require social skills to use properly. A very small number of function words account for most of the words we hear, read and say. English has about 450 common function words in total; which account for 55 per cent of the words we use.

To put this into perspective, the average English speaker has a vocabulary of perhaps 100,000 words. More than 99.9 per cent of this is made up of content words but these account for less than half of the words we use.

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Function words are both short and hard to perceive. One reason we have trouble spotting their high rate of usage is that our brains naturally slide over them. We automatically focus on content words as they provide the basic who, what and where of a conversation.

This distinction can also be seen in people with brain damage. Occasionally, a person will have a brain injury that affects their ability to use content words but not function words. Injuries in other areas can produce the opposite results.

The two brain regions of interest are Broca's and Wernicke's areas. If a person with damage to their Broca's area were asked to describe a picture of, say, a girl and an old woman, he or she might say, 'Girl ... ummm ... woman ... ahh ... picture, uhhh ... old.' Someone with a damaged Wernicke's area might say, 'Well, right here is one of them and I think she's next to that one. So if I see over there you'll see her too.' To say that Broca's area controls style words and Wernicke's controls content words is a gross oversimplification. Nevertheless, it points to the fact that the distinction between content and style words is occurring at a fairly basic level in the brain.

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The ability to use function words is a marker of basic social skills - and analysing how people use them reveals a great deal about their social worlds. That is not to say a single sentence is particularly revealing. If you mention 'a chair' versus 'that chair', it says very little about you.

But what if we monitored your words over the course of a week? What if we found that you use 'a' and 'the' at high rates, or hardly at all?

In fact, there are people who use articles at very high rates and others who rarely use them. Men tend to use them at higher rates than women. Gender aside, high article users tend to be more organised, emotionally stable, conscientious, politically conservative and older.