20th April 2001
John August, David Bofinger, Max Bradley, Mark Drummond, Elaine Thompson, Phillipa Thorburn, Jon Tourle, Klaas Woldring.
JA asked everyone to state their view on the problems of the current system, and their preferred alternative. DB asked that they mention both long-term and first-step solutions.
MB said that the main problems lay in having two overseers with which to deal. Federal-local interactions included grants, environmental matters. His council had to report to state and to local and it wasn't even the same form.
PT said children moving interstate had a lot of trouble because starting ages, school years, curricula, etc. weren't standard. Health also had problems, e.g. with mental outpatients only being monitored if they stayed in their home state.
ET identified environmental issues as having an enormous scope, from very local to very global. She also thought it important to identify what we hoped to achieve by abolishing the states, and suggested responsiveness, responsibility, accountability and efficiency.
DB pointed everyone at his discussion paper and asked for feedback.
MB said to abolish the state governments and transfer all their powers to the commonwealth, to which PT, DB, ET and MD agreed. MB declined to suggest intermediate steps, saying this should be done immediately.
PT suggested that as a first step New South Wales and Victoria could fuse. She also wanted more money for councils and more of them. PT stated that the commonwealth should set policy and require outcomes, and the local governments should have freedom to implement it in their own way. ET, MD and KW agreed. DB said he thought that policy and implementation would in practice have a blurry divide. He thought that the local government should be a creature of the commonwealth, and though it may be desirable for the commonwealth to allow implementational autonomy to the local government level, in practice it would do as it saw fit. ET hesitantly agreed.
It was DB's perception that the idea of a regional level of government, replacing the present state and local levels, had been strongly supported at previous meetings but by the time of this meeting its support had ebbed. MB said that a region of, say, one-hundred-thousand people including Berrigan would cover an area the size of Victoria (check) and that the people of the region would have nothing in common. He was therefore against regions, and there was agreement from DB, MD and ET (amongst others?).
MB pointed out that many function of state (and federal?) government are administered through regions anyway, it's just that the regions are drawn independently by separate functions of government. So the arrangement of policing administration regions has nothing to do with the arrangement used for, say, schools (not MB example?). Berrigan is a member of about 80 government regions and over 170 regions in total (including such bodies as the Lyons Club in the second category). The regions are drawn to be appropriate to a particular responsibility: this system generally works well and should be retained. A major problem with states is that it makes it impossible to draw the regions across state borders.
KW thought local governments should be mentioned in the constitution. Unfortunately KW had to leave early and so this idea was not explored.
MB remarked that when councils seek to amalgamate the impetus almost always comes from mayors and administrators, not from voters or councillors.
MD quoted some statistics on the division of resources between levels of government. The thrust was that Australia is anomalous amongst western countries in having a very low level of spending at the local government level (6%, vice 20 to 25% typical). DB asked whether this could be hiding the regional-level administration of expenditure as described by MB. MD said that these were standard international benchmarks and the best data we had at the moment.
DB, MB, ET, PT and JT agreed that:
The State governments should be abolished immediately, and their powers (including all sovereignty) transferred to the commonwealth. The commonwealth would be expected to delegate implementation responsibility to the local government, and to the regional level as it sees fit, as is done now by the states.
After the meeting MD proposed an alternative consensus proposal, which at time of writing has not been seriously discussed.
The ASC (Abolish the States Collective) agrees/believes that Australia should move to an affordable “best possible” system of government, absent of the states/territories in their present form, with a one-vote-one-value electoral system, in which political and financial powers presently held by the states/territories are transferred to the Commonwealth and local/regional governments so as to achieve uniform laws and an appropriate balance of centralisation and decentralisation.AND
In its efforts to achieve a system as above, the ASC is leading a process of public consulatation, education and advocacy in order to provide the people at large with the opportunity to contribute to and share in the ownership of the process of designing a new “best possible” system and bringing it into being.
The dates 8th June 2001 and 18th May 2001 were discussed. There was a conclusion, and it will be entered here when I am told what it was.
KW suggested that we might get more done in a meeting if we didn't have it over dinner. Some venues were considered, including the South Sydney Leagues Club, and private homes. No decision yet, further discussion by electronic means expected.
MB offered to host a meeting in Berrigan, describing it as having great and cheap food, no parking problems, no public transport, very poor mobile phone reception, great weather, and great distance from Sydney.
I welcome feedback at David.Bofinger@dsto.defenceSpamProofing.gov.au. This web site has further material on the Abolish the States Collective.
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