The Leader of the Opposition, John Howard, has sensibly distanced himself from Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett’s slash-and-burn attitude to the Federal Public Service. Last month Mr Kennett engaged in an unthoughtful diatribe against the Federal bureaucracy, making unsubstantiated and inconsistent claims that the top public servants had failed to show leadership or contribute to Government policy. He said they were not like Victoria’s top public service who “”are very much full partners in trying to bring about a restoration to Victoria’s base.
The inconsistency has been in Mr Kennett’s criticism of what he called Labor’s politicisation of the top of the public service on one hand yet calling on it to lead and create policy on the other. And it is all right, of course, for top public servants in Victoria to be “”in partnership” with a Liberal Government.
In Canberra this week Mr Howard said, “”It is not appropriate in the modern Liberal Party for just generalised slanging of public servants.” It is a welcome distancing from Mr Kennett’s remarks and from the approach of the former Liberal leader, John Hewson, who stood on a platform of a huge reduction in the Federal Public service.
It may be that Mr Howard has his eye to the seat of Canberra which his party won in the March by-election and which it hopes to retain under its new name of Namadgi. It may also be that his view of Australian federalism has matured in the face of popular rejection of earlier simplistic policies to reduce the Federal Government to defence and a few other functions and hand everything back to the states.
Australian history shows the will of the people recognises a broad national role for the Federal Government. Post-war referendums overwhelmingly gave the Federal Government a role in social security and Aboriginal affairs for example. The social-security role has been manifested in Medicare and the Aboriginal affairs role has been manifested in the Native Title Act. In this context it is silly to imagine that Australia can have a federal structure that gives the central government a subordinate role as merely foreign-affairs and defence agent for quasi-independent states.
If anything, the people recognise the need for a reasonably strong central government, but that it should not have absolute power; it should be tempered by regional governments to give strength to local democracy. Historical accident means that those regional governments are the six states. Both sides of politics are slowly recognising the obvious. The Whitlam dream of abolishing the states and replacing them with 20 or 20 regional governments is as ethereal as the hardline economic rationalist view that the six states should work as competing corporate entities with the Federal Government reduced to printing currency and hiring an army.
Mr Howard did not resile from his philosophical commitment to the private sector and smaller government, but he must resist pressure from other elements in his party to convert that commitment into an unnecessary and counter-productive assault on the Federal Public Service. Efficient government is in the interest of all Australians, including Canberrans. Slash and burn or wholesale centralism is not.