In 2008-2009 circa there was a qld club competition.
all i remember about it was the cricket scores put on the visiting country rugby clubs or when a qpr club went to the regions.
i don’t believe there was one upset result.
if we are doing a national club competition knock out style should feature the 9 qpr clubs. 12 Shute shield clubs and then maybe winner of vic, Act and wa comps for a 24 team bracket
The trick with that is you can goose it a bit to technically include all clubs from WA/ACT/Vic by the way you seed teams and plan the knock out rounds. You'd be building a version of the
FA cup style system where different competitions are different "levels" and are included in consecutive rounds while teams from lower comps have been knocked out. Ideally you would focus these knockout rounds locally early on to reduce travel burden and they could even operate as a special round of the normal comp to help with scheduling. Comps with odd numbers of clubs would probably see the previous years winner get to come in a round later on the knockout. This has more or less the same effect as only the winner (or top x teams) of the lower ranked comps make it through to play the higher ranked ones, but there is a bit more opportunity (and hopefully buy in) across the teams involved in those comps, because each team still has the potential to go all the way.
Eventually this could theoretically be extended to any and all comps, but I'm skeptical that would work here, mostly because of geography (but also potential the safety issues present in rugby mismatches and load management for any smaller club that went on a long run).
Edit: you also cant do a 24 team bracket without adding in more teams in later rounds. Once you get to knock outs only the number of teams has to be a power of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.)