With yet another Council of Australian Governments meeting set to convene this week, it is now an opportune time to acknowledge that a new approach to federalism is needed.
Since the election of the federal Labor government in late 2007, 10 meetings of federal and state heads of government have already been convened. This compares to the record of the former Howard government, with an equivalent number of meetings strewn over a period from June 2001 to April 2007. Former prime minister Kevin Rudd saw the need for more COAG gatherings as a way to implement his 2007 election agenda and subsequent undertakings, such as the ambition to create a ''seamless'' national economy ameliorating interstate variations in business regulations.
While the Commonwealth Government might possess the ''power of the purse'' in the Australian federation, it does not have the constitutional responsibility or managerial expertise to engender changes in expenditure or regulatory settings in many areas that directly affect the lives of Australians.
The states, on the other hand, do happen to maintain the responsibility and expertise in regulating and delivering services in priority areas such as education, health and transport.
For Rudd, regular COAG meetings offered him the potential to either seduce or browbeat the states into implementing his policy agenda, using the Commonwealth's funding influence as the key leveraging mechanism.
Over a period of three years it has become clear that the increasing numbers of COAG meetings have not necessarily correlated with the delivery of policy outcomes.
In other words, the ambitious Rudd agenda has fallen short of realisation.
The COAG Reform Council, a bureaucratic body established to check if jurisdictions are implementing the commitments they make, has lambasted the lack of implementation of key elements of the COAG reform agenda.
In some respects, the council has noted that even the availability of consistent, quality data to check progress has not been forthcoming.
The business community, senior government officials and others have roundly criticised the ''executive federalism'' approach of COAG that has become mired in process, and with a progressive overload of commitments yet to be fulfilled.
In response to the overload and weighty, yet unrealistic, ambitions foisted on COAG, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has foreshadowed that one of the key areas close to implementation stage national health reform is to be shelved.
One of the key sticking points unravelling the health reform process has been the inability of the Commonwealth to claw back GST revenue in order to achieve its aspiration as majority funder of the states' public hospitals.
With the Liberal Premier of Western Australia previously criticising COAG for its duplication, overlap and confusion, and with new Coalition partners at the COAG table in Victoria and possibly NSW presumably harbouring similar attitudes, the chance to implement other COAG commitments has become even more difficult for the Commonwealth Government.
The alternative to the ''COAGulation'' of executive federalism is a greater emphasis by the states themselves on fashioning their own innovative solutions to a variety of public policy problems. This is often described as the ''competitive federalism'' approach to governance.
There are many well-known arguments favouring competitive federalism that emphasise unilateral policy actions by individual state and territory governments.
Competing and reforming governments can set themselves up as providing ''policy laboratories'' for reform, conducive to the discovery of workable policies.
The imitation and enhancement of existing policies by competing jurisdictions can add to the body of knowledge concerning effective solutions to problems.
In conjunction with this supplyside dynamic, the locational decisions of firms and individuals in effect reveal the preferences of these agents regarding the suite of taxes, public spending and regulatory settings on offer.
There have been many examples of this competitive element to federalism in the past delivering good outcomes for citizens. These included the unilateral effort of Queensland to abolish death duties, and the microeconomic reform efforts of the Court, Greiner and Kennett governments in Western Australia, NSW and Victoria respectively during the 1990s.
There is now a sufficient array of information to allow aspirant state policymakers to track their reform efforts against rival jurisdictions, and to enable residents of each state to put pressure on their politicians to improve the quality of policies on offer.
State budgets are now prepared on the basis of a uniform presentation framework in accrual terms, and tax burdens are benchmarked by such bodies as the Productivity Commission, which continue to develop indicators of expenditure levels and the regulatory burden.
The sooner that Australia engenders a shift from executive federalism where a domineering Federal Government attempts to impose a one-size-fits-all policy regimes on the general public, to competitive federalism emphasising unilateral policy change and innovative differentiation, the sooner it can realise its economic potential.
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