Prime Minister John Howard could well be secretly hoping Labor wins this month’s election in Western Australia.
While ever all the state and territory governments are Labor ones, Howard will get support for his centralist policies – most recently expressed in industrial relations and education.
It is a far cry from the Fraser years. Remember New Federalism under which the new Coalition Government would wind back the dangerous centralist socialist policies of the Whitlam Government. Since at least 1972 the Liberal Party has stood for states rights against the onslaught of centralism which it equated with socialism and meddling state control. It riled against Labor’s use of constitutional inventiveness like the expansion of the foreign-affairs power to enable the central government to get its way in fields such as the environment, discrimination law and unfair dismissal.
Now the Liberals have been in power in Canberra for nearly a decade, their tune has changed. Their earlier objection to centralism in principle has fallen away. They want to override the states and territories.
The Liberal Party itself is very much a creature of federalism. Its state bodies are independent. Its national organisation does not have anywhere near the policy-formulating powers of Labor’s national convention. Nor does it have the Labor Party’s system of “national intervention” when the state branches go awry.
Liberal Prime Ministers Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser were federalists. Howard, on the other hand, seems much more a centralist.
A lot of the Whitlamite centralists, however, will scream blue murder at Howard’s plans in industrial relations and education, even though they might have advocated the abolition of the states because the states were an impediment to the grand program of progressive intervention.
In fact, the left-right divide on centralism is not one about the principles of federation but about the character of the policies being pursued. A more important argument is about what works best.
In this instance, Howard’s agenda for industrial relations and education have a lot of merit, as indeed do a lot of arguments about having a national approach in other fields.
Howard is rightly suspicious of the states. They mess things up all the time. Give them money for an immunisation program and immunisation rates plummet, so the Feds have to take over. The states and territories kill people in hospitals. They kill and abuse children in their care and the mentally ill. They make a hash of public transport. They become too reliant on gambling and property booms.
They waste large sums of money in grandiose vote-buying schemes. Look how Howard rightly ducked the mad scheme to pipe water from the Kimberly put by the Western Australian Liberal leader, Colin Barnett.
The lower the level of government in Australia, the greater the incompetence and corruption.
Sure, the Feds are not perfect (immigration, civil liberties, indigenous matters etc), but federally run programs like Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and even Native Title are models of efficiency and rectitude compared many state programs. And corruption at the Federal level is usually about minor travel rorts and marginal-seat favouritism – not brown-paper-bag stuff like WA Inc and material uncovered by the Fitzgerald inquiry.
The nation will be far better off with Howard’s single national industrial relations scheme and a single Australian Year 12 certificate. The point is not whether it is a Howard scheme, but whether it is a well-run national scheme, rather than a hotch-potch of eight mediocrely run schemes.
Remember, these two schemes will, after one or more elections, inevitably be run by a Labor Government.
The big question now is how will Howard get away with it constitutionally.
After the Tasmanian Dam case in 1983 Federal Labor turned away from forcing its will on the states through legislation that stretched the Commonwealth’s constitutional powers – using the stick. Instead it went down the carrot path. Those states that complied with the Commonwealth’s wishes would get extra money. For example, those states that introduced a 0.05 alcohol limit on drivers would get extra road money. Those states who met competition guidelines got extra money.
The Howard Government has followed the pattern.
This is likely to work with education. Those states that apply the Federal Year 12 certificate will get extra money. If any state still objects the Feds might give money directly to schools that run the certificate.
But industrial relations is more difficult. State Labor Governments will not give up the industrial-relations power easily, even with hefty bribes. The union base remains strong. And the financial backing unions give Labor directly probably has greater vote-buying capacity than any money that might come to the general state revenue in the form of federal grants for voluntarily giving up industrial relations. Some proof of this can be seen by the fact that a new Victorian Labor Government re-regulated industrial relations after Liberal Jeff Kennett had handed it to the Feds and that ACT Labor regards the mere $150,000 or so that it gets directly from a union-associated club more important than several million it might get in general revenue if it offended that club by widening poker machine outlets.
So Howard will have to go down the legislative-coercive path. The Commonwealth’s industrial relations power is limited to interstate matters. But the Commonwealth has a broad power over corporations, and that includes the smallest family company. It is therefore likely that the Government will introduce a national industrial-relations scheme for all people employed by companies. That will leave virtually nothing for the states.
It will be a union-unfriendly scheme, no doubt. And therein lies the theme behind the Liberals’ departure in industrial relations and education from their normal states-rights approach. The Liberals do not like unions. In particular, they do not like teachers’ unions, which they see as responsible for lowering standards and ignoring parents’ views.
These two proposed national schemes are another example of the right deed for the wrong reason.