Overgoverned, overmonarchised, overtaxed

Saturday 5 July 2008 - Filed under Life Outside Work

While listening to ABC Newsradio yesterday, one of the headlines “jumped off the page”: The Defence Minister calling for the abolition of the states because Australia is overgoverned. I looked up what Mr Fitzgibbon said:

It’s a system that leaves us the most over-governed country in the world. Fourteen houses of parliament for 22 million people. In Tasmania they have an MP for every 8,000 electors.

The duplication, the inefficiencies, the buck passing and blame shifting costs our economy billions. Indeed, the Business Council of Australia puts it at $9 billion annually. And I’m sure the current model frustrates even the most patient in our society – whether it be the individual trying to secure an answer to a health policy issue or a business trying to work across state borders and facing six to eight regulatory frameworks.

And Google found me a Sydney Morning Herald article published in 2007 that portrayed the views of other politicians on this:

[Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans, Australian Democrats, NSW] said abolishing state governments would save $36 billion a year and prevent cost shifting. “The main objective of both state and federal policy is to shift the cost onto the other branch,” he said. “The reasons the states were set up were because they were so far away. But that is irrelevant now .. The state parliaments are just a waste of money.”

… Another group of candidates, Shed a Tier, is standing for the upper house on a platform of abolishing the states. “We are overgoverned, overmonarchised and overtaxed,” said the group’s campaign director, Peter Consandine, who runs the Republican Party of Australia. “Since the 1960s, when the global economy kicked in, we have not needed the states. If we didn’t have state governments we could phase out the conveyancing tax, land tax, payroll tax and even the goods and services tax.”

To be honest, I didn’t know there was a Republican Party of Australia up until yesterday morning. While I have no emotional ties with Labor, the Australian Democrats, or the Republicans, it was refreshing to see some state and federal politicians openly label the state tier of government “a waste of money.”

Anyway, here are some of the things that are covered or ought to be covered in the citizenship test. In the Commonwealth of Australia, there are:

• 6 states and 2 territories, 3 of which have fewer than 500,000 residents
• 9 governments at or above the state level
• 19 Commonwealth/federal government departments plus 113 state/territory government departments (= 19 New South Wales + 10 Victoria + 18 Queensland + 23 Western Australia + 13 South Australia + 10 Tasmania + 12 Northern Territory + 8 Australian Capital Territory), and 1,000+ state government agencies
• 5 State Parliaments, 1 State Legislative Assembly, and 2 Territory Legislative Assemblies in addition to The Parliament of Australia
• 8 sets of near-carbon copies of all sorts of state laws, some of which are inevitably in conflict with their federal counterparts
• 8 police forces (hence chiefs and jurisdictions) including the Australian Federal Police
• 8 capital cities
• 5 time zones in summer, 3 in winter, subject to change pending future referenda and law amendments in relation to each state’s daylight-saving policy
• state and federal elections that have different cycles
• a constant juggling act between the federal and state governments over what falls under whose turf (normally concerning huge sums of money, too), with the federal government wielding the ultimate power to override with good reason whichever state laws they choose

… all this for a grand total of 0.02 billion people, which amounts to just over half the population of the State of California.

And then there are state- and federal-level taxes, which I am not able to comment on because I know little about which is which.

All in all, the idea of maintaining the states feels redundant, vexatious, colonial, and even artificial for 2008. With the “waste of money” part, $9 billion a year and $36 billion a year sound equally astronomical to me. More importantly, though, I don’t think the individual states of Australia today are culturally, ideologically, economically, linguistically, socially, geographically, or politically distinct enough from each other (OK, maybe not geographically) to justify or necessitate hard-coded barriers within. If Team “Australia” beat England in cricket as early as 1882, why couldn’t the successors of the colonial governments transcend their colonial legacy after all these “centuries” and do business under Australia branding?

But hold on – any real changes down this path will mean changes to the constitution. Since it’s difficult and costly to amend the constitution in a democracy, why not throw in a couple more changes and save billions of dollars and more national referenda in the years to come: Going republic, and extending the government term to something substantially longer than the current three years.

2008-07-05  »  JK