A Nation Finds Ways To Tie Itself In Knots

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday April 14, 2007

YESTERDAY was not an auspicious day for Australian federalism. The ideas of the federal Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, on merit pay for teachers have gone completely by the board at the meeting of state and federal education ministers in Darwin. And the national curriculum is out, too, though the ministers involved did not put it that way. Instead they announced they would be working towards a nationally consistent set of curriculums, and a national benchmarking authority. That sounds suspiciously like not much change at all, expressed in language of which Sir Humphrey Appleby would be proud.

In Canberra, meanwhile, at the Council of Australian Governments, the Premier of Victoria, Steve Bracks, stubbornly held out against the Commonwealth's sensible and generous offer to take control of the Murray-Darling Basin, which would rationalise water allocation and help the rivers back to health. The Prime Minister, John Howard, apparently foresaw that yesterday's meeting was likely to labour mightily and produce little,because in the week before he wrote to the premiers and chief ministers with a proposal to fund new uniform regulatory codes, provided they referred their powers to the Commonwealth.

The states were not the only ones wielding wet blankets. The premiers went to Canberra with an agenda of their own - climate change. They sought to go ahead with a carbon trading scheme with targets for reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases. The Commonwealth is reluctant, not least because it suspects the premiers are doing the bidding of the federal Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, in highlighting an issue on which it is vulnerable. So it devised a red herring: Mr Howard offered to fund a climate change adaptation centre instead, which will provide advice on the various effects of climate change. We will know about the damage from climate change, in other words, but we will not be committed to do anything about it.

If the premiers' conference's attempts at reforms in all these areas produced more whimpers than bangs, elsewhere things have been no better this week. The federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has suggested that the Clarence River be dammed for the benefit of south-east Queensland. He has the support of the Prime Minister, who said, quite rightly: "It's not NSW water, it's Australian water and I think Australian water should be available for Australians on terms that are fair and equitable for people in all parts of the country." The grounds for judging such a scheme should be whether it will work and is environmentally sound. Sydney, for example, already draws water, quite justifiably, from the distant Shoalhaven River. But there is a difference: it crosses no border to get to the city. Mr Turnbull's worthwhile proposal looks far morevulnerable to a far less justifiableobstacle: interstate rivalry, endemic in our federal system.

The Council of Australian Governments is a singularly suggestive title. How many governments are there running Australia? The answer is nine - and each is apparently able to stymie or water down, if it chooses, any efforts the others may make from time to time to streamline or rationalise the administration of the country. How many governments does one country need? The foolish decisions of the Australian colonies' early railway engineers to build tracks with differing gauges are the enduring symbol of the drawbacks of a federal system. The states have at least taken that lesson to heart in some areas: power supply voltages are the same; we all drive on the same side of the road. But in so many other areas our metaphorical gauges still differ. The hobbles they impose are enduring, and our eight provincial parliaments labour year in and year out to produce more of them, while twice a year their leaders troop off to Canberra and promisesolemnly to undo one or two of them, or at least to make them a uniform shape.

Future generations may well look back on this period of Australian history and shake their heads as they ask: why did this country put so much effort into persisting with a system that routinely produced such irrational and second-rate outcomes?