A WONDERFUL Yes Minister skit has Minister Jim Hacker putting on his best Churchillian voice to Sir Humphrey and likening the economy to a runaway bus.
“It is time for someone to get into the driver’s seat, Humphrey, and put his foot on the er, er, er.”
And his voice trails off as the mixed metaphor mashes into hopeless inconsistency.
The Australian Federation is a bit like that bus. Every now and then the bus goes too fast or too slow. It even goes down the wrong track. It is a fairly inefficient bus.
How much better to have a bus with a single, efficient, competent driver and get rid of the eight passengers who are shouting contradictory or over-lapping directions?
Surely the passengers should be told to shut up or be turfed out or abolished so the bus can be more efficiently driven.
Maybe. But what if the driver turns out to be Jim Hacker?
I recalled the skit this week when Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce renewed his call for the abolition of the states.
Joyce argues that we should have regional government instead. He says the Senate no longer works, if it ever has, because it is not a states’ house. In any event, he argues, virtually all the senators from each state have their offices in the state capitals and/or live there, so they cannot represent the regions.
This argument is also to be put in a book by Opposition frontbencher Tony Abbott.
Both Abbott and Joyce argue the efficiency line. State governments duplicate administration, they argue.
It used to be the left arguing to abolish the states. The left’s argument stemmed from the states and the Constitution being used to frustrate the great socialist dream of the Chifley Government to nationalise the banks and later for the Whitlam Government to embark on great national adventures and social experiments nationwide.
In the Howard years and even now, it is the right arguing against the states, whereas hitherto conservatives had supported “states rights” against the centre. John Howard’s Work Choices legislation was perhaps the biggest shift to central power since the uniform tax cases during World War II. Work Choices gutted the states’ industrial-relations apparatus.
Equally, the conservatives under Howard disliked the way the states were getting in the way of literacy and numeracy testing; school league tables and efficient hospital systems.
The Rudd Government has shown every sign of sharing those views.
So for most abolition protagonists, the argument is little more than that the states get in the way of their ideology so they should be abolished.
A better way to look at it would be whether Australia should be a federation of states or be a unitary system with some form of regional government.
Geographically large countries, like Australia, Canada, the US, Russia and Brazil, almost have to be federations. It is too difficult to govern over such large areas with different time zones and often different regional outlooks. In a way it is more inefficient for a distant central government to manage things so far away. Indeed, an enormous effort can go into unnecessarily unifying things – dragging the recalcitrants in.
Even geographically small countries, like Germany and Britain, are federations or almost federations in order to deal with significant regional differences.
Even in a fairly homogeneous place like Australia, there are significant differences in attitudes between the states and territories. Victoria, the ACT and South Australia are much more socially liberal. Queensland and Western Australia are more entrepreneurial.
Those differences should be expressed in the democratic process that creates laws and policies applying in those areas.
Regional or local governments do not do the job because they lack the clout. They cannot legislate – they merely administer law made in the centre. And they can be easily overridden by the centre.
Indeed, the centre’s propensity to override has been demonstrated by the Federal Government over-turning territory legislation or policy on same-sex unions, euthanasia and heroin trials. If a state tried those things, the central government would have trouble because the states have sovereignty that cannot be totally overridden by the centre which has limited, even if wide, powers.
Regional and local governments do not have that sovereignty and it would be hard to give it to them because such small entities would have difficulty mustering enough good people to form such a government. The ACT has difficulty enough.
A great benefit of the federation is that the smaller state jurisdictions can experiment and legislate in a way that the central government might not, for fear of pockets of vote-changing opposition. Victoria’s seat-belt laws and other traffic firsts are good examples.
But the biggest benefit is the closer relationship between elected politicians and voters at a more local level. Those politicians become more responsive to issues of concern locally that would get lost at a central level.
It may be a bit inefficient but more democracy is worth paying for.
To the extent Australia is over-governed, it is not because of the federal-state overlap. Rather it is because the Executive at both federal and state is too dominant over both Parliament and the people.
Good recent examples are the anti-terrorism laws, bikie laws and the proposal to hobble the internet with “filtering” that will inevitably block more than just the targeted pedophilia sites.
If Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott are worried about too much government they should support a bill of rights which would prevent government from infringing on basic rights of free speech, assembly, association, arrest, search and conviction only good cause and due process and so on.
Keep the states. Sure, they often do silly, costly and pernicious things (like the bikie laws), but because we have six of them and two territories they usually show each other up.
For example, Victoria and the ACT have not gone down the draconian bikie path, leaving it to existing criminal law. In doing so they have shown up the NSW and South Australian Governments for the over-reacting fear mongers that they are. Enforcement of the existing law would do more than rights-infringing legislative tub-thumping.
As for replacing the ACT Government with a “regional” or “local” government – would you really want to surrender the government of ACT over state-level matters to a federal minister who would rule without accountability by fiat according to whatever momentary matter fired the popular passion?