From Hoss58 above - You raise some interesting points. At the end of the day there only "x" amount of dollars to go around and i suspect that even it the powers that be said yep you guys can have a tower in (insert favorite location) but the users i.e airlines, flying schools,charter operators and private flying will have to pay for it then i just don't see it happening. Could the old system i.e flight service have developed/morphed/matured into an system that is user friendly and cost effective? We will never know.
Hoss - we do know, the old flight service was re-invented by someone at CASA as a CA/GRS. Those exist at Ayers Rock and Ballina, and in the form of an AFIS at Port Hedland. However while the AFIS is an ATS run by Airservices the CA/GRS are not an ATS. They are however, all operated by either ex-FSOs or ex-ATCs. On top of that there are ATCs providing area flight information services using surveillance in Class G airspace. As seems typical of CASA these days, these arrangements are half-hearted, half-cocked and half-baked! There is very little logic applied only knee-jerk reactions as per the Broadcast Area announced at Ballina. However CASA has been seen to do something, even though it simply kicks the can down the road for someone else to pick up.
I go back to my original point - we should not have to wait until an aerodrome becomes more risk prone (that is passes some ficticious marker created by Government officials, such as numbers of movements or passengers) before having those same bureaucrats get around to making an airspace assessment, then talk the Airservices' bureacrats into building a Taj Mahal populated by government-employed ATCs. The provision of a Tower (or an AFIS) should be part of the aerodrome owners planning as they develop their business. They then have a product to present to the market in order to attract public transport services, or a flying school, or a heavy aircraft maintenance operation, or an RFDS base, or whatever they have in mind. Waiting until the risk has already arrived is not the way that modern aviation nations do business.