Category: Federalism & the Constitution

Is HECS a tax?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

Commenter Charles objects to HECS as

an exotic tax aimed at passing education costs to the next generation

Though until 2004 I thought that HECS could reasonably be classified as a tax, that analysis would have been disputed by the courts. Under the Constitution, there is a distinction between taxes and fees for services, and arguably HECS was a fee for service, in that the person who paid it became entitled to a specific service in return.

However, HECS had other attributes of a tax: it was set by the government, it went to the government, and was mostly collected by the Australian Taxation Office (up-front payments went direct to universities, but as money owed to the Commonwealth, with an adjustment to the government income of universities as a result). It made the Australian tax-welfare system mildly more progressive than it would otherwise have been.

But since the student contribution amount system came into force in 2005, I do not think ‘tax’ is the best description of this payment.
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Why the Liberals should be federalists again

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

Tony Abbott is an unrepentant conservative centralist. Giving some initial publicity to his forthcoming book Conservatism After Howard, he told journalists that he wanted the Constitution changed to give the federal government complete power to pass laws over-riding the states:

The electorate wants problems solved and they don’t want a treatise on why the relevant level of government can’t solve a problem because it lacks the power.

“The federal government is totally hamstrung by the legal authority that resides in the states. Where the federal government needs to take charge, it shouldn’t need to bribe the states to do so – and it only operates as long as the bribe is in place.”

Some new polling suggests that, with some regret, the electorate agrees with him. As a general principle, a slim majority supports the proprosition that

It is better for decisions to be made at the lowest level of government competent to deal with the decision.

Continue reading “Why the Liberals should be federalists again” →

The political decline of federalism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

Polling on federalism is pretty rare, but in a new ANU Poll they have replicated a 1979 question that asked:

Do you think the state governments should give some powers to the federal government, or do you think the federal government has enough powers already?

In the last 30 years, the proportion of people thinking that more powers should be given to the feds has more than doubled, from 17% to 40%. Unfortunately, respondents were not asked which powers should be handed over.

On the question of whether the federal government should provide more money to the states, the proportion opposing it increased from 30% to 38%, perhaps because respondents doubt it would be spent competently.

The second question highlights, however, what is wrong with Australian federalism – not so much the formal division of powers, but the states’ reliance on federal funding. Until that is fixed, the system will never work.

What is ‘ministerial responsibility’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

It’s been a slow election for open letters and political advertising from worthies, but things have picked up in the last few days. In The Weekend Australian, there was an ad from Doctors for the Environment Australia about, you guessed it, climate change. Last election it was doctors’ wives getting into the fashionable issues, this time it is the doctors themselves.

And this morning we had a blast from the 1970s, with Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser turning up in The Australian‘s letter pages (with the planned-for news coverage as well). Their topic was ‘ministerial responsibility’. ‘In the past two decades,’ they say,

the constitutional principle that ministers should be responsible for the failings of their policy or administration has been seriously undermined. No matter how grave their failings may be, ministers no longer resign.

But in reality there is no such constitutional principle (and who is Fraser to talk about constitutional principles, anyway?). Ministers are responsible in the sense that they must answer questions in the Parliament and elsewhere on their policies and performance, but resignation or replacement of Ministers is a matter of political judgment, not principle.
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Can only a Coalition government deliver Constitutional Reconciliation?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 3 Comments

At a press conference on Friday, the Prime Minister implied that only a Coalition government could secure a change to the Constitution recognising Indigenous Australians:

The indigenous people of this country are different from anybody else because they were here first and they have a very special place and I think we have an opportunity to honour that place in a respectful, symbolic fashion by putting something in the Constitution. But you won’t do that unless you are able to unite conservative Australia with the rest of the country and conservative Australia will not vote for something that is built on shame and repudiation.

The SMH reported it more strongly: ‘”I don’t believe Labor could unite conservative and progressive Australia on this issue,” he said.’

Certainly, the record of Constitutional referendums that don’t have bipartisan support is a dismal one. And it is Coalition supporters that are least sympathetic to traditional Aboriginal politics. A Newspoll in 2000 on an apology found that while 60% of Labor voters favoured an apology, only 22% of Coalition voters were in support. The 2004 Australian Election Survey found that 60% of Liberal identifiers thought that land rights had gone too far, compared to 30% of Labor identifiers.

The relationship between voters’ partisan loyalties and their views on issues is, however, not straightforward. Continue reading “Can only a Coalition government deliver Constitutional Reconciliation?” →

Unhealthy federalism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 25 Comments

This morning’s ACNielsen poll attracted most attention for adding another week to Labor’s remarkable lead in the polls, but it also reported some interesting issue polling.

Alas, support for federalism – at least so far as it concerns hospitals – is no stronger than the Coalition primary vote. 40% think that it would be better if hospitals were run by the states, compared to 42% who think the federal government should do it.

I doubt that this is an ideological thing; federalism (as opposed to parochial concerns with ‘state’s rights’) has never really been widely understood among the politically active, much less the masses. It is a pragmatic assessment of which level of government seems most competent, with 55% of those polled agreeing that the health system is ‘not very well run’, and nearly twice as many people (46%) blame the states for this as blame the federal government (24%).

Personally, I doubt the federal government would do a better job. The Canberra bureaucracy has relatively little experience of service delivery compared to their state counterparts, and with the added disadvantage of being very remote from the places they need to service. The one advantage of the otherwise poor policy on display in Mersey hospital takeover may be to provide evidence that the Commonwealth does no better at running hospitals than the states.

The 1967 Constitutional referendum

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the biggest ever yes vote in an Australian Constitutional referendum. But what exactly were people voting for? One interesting argument of two recent books, a revised edition of The 1967 Referendum: Race, Power and the Australian Constitution by Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, and Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public by Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, is that confusion was as common then as it is now.

In the 1960s, many people argued that Constitutional change was necessary to give Aboriginal Australians citizenship, and that’s the interpretation still being put on it today. On ABC TV’s Insiders this morning we were told:

As hard as it is to believe in retrospect, just four decades ago, Aborigines were not counted as citizens.

Hard to believe, indeed, as all Aborigines had been citizens since 1948, and many (the ‘half-castes’) much earlier. Yet the citizenship claim was also made in the opening few minutes of tonight’s SBS documentary Vote Yes for Aborigines (though contradicted later in the programme). The common belief that Aborigines were given the vote in the referendum isn’t right either, and even the idea that they weren’t counted in the census isn’t strictly correct – the Bureau of Statistics did count them, but the number was ignored for certain purposes.
Continue reading “The 1967 Constitutional referendum” →

A separation of partisan power?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

A Newspoll in this morning’s Australian (can’t see a link, but it should be on the Newspoll website soon) explored whether voters see the federal structure as a way of distributing power not just between the States and the Commonwealth, but also between Liberal and Labor. At first glance, a plurality see benefit in such a division of power. 42% of respondents thought that overall it would be bad for Australia if Labor controlled both levels of government, while 37% said it would be good.

But a breakdown of such opinion according to party support suggests that this result has less to do with preferring a separation of partisan power than with concern about one’s own party. For example, 76% of Coalition supporters think that having Labor in power at both levels would be bad for Australia, compared to 22% of Labor voters. On the other hand, 60% of Labor supporters think that it would be good for Australia if Labor controlled both levels of government, compared to 9% of Coalition voters (That many? Perhaps they think that it would end blame shifting and encourage cooperation.)

This is unlikely to be just Labor voters, with their faith in the state, lacking concern with a division of power. We can see this from a question in the 2004 Australian Election Survey about a semi-analagous situation, the same party controlling both the Senate and the House of Representatives. With knowledge of the Senate outcome (the survey was conducted after the election) 56% of Coalition voters thought that it was better for the same party to control both houses, compared to 12% of Labor voters.
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Is higher education next?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 8 Comments

The Prime Minister says that today’s High Court decision won’t be used as a “mandate to massively extend the powers of the Commonwealth”. But perhaps merely a “large” rather than a “massive” extension?

After all, Education Minister Julie Bishop has in recent months been showing some constitutional impatience. The main head of power in the Constitution the Commonwealth uses for universities is the “benefits to students” provision in section 51. This lets the Commonwealth provide conditional grants to universities, but doesn’t let them control universities’ governing legislation. This does not please Ms Bishop. In October she was complaining about various alleged deficiencies in university governance arrangements. University governance is a responsibility of the states. This displeasure seemed, however, to go beyond just governance. In another October speech she said:

Universities are creatures of our states, set up under state legislation, they are accredited, registered, audited, governed by the states. The states even nominate their representative for Councils and Senates. So where is their financial contribution? Just 2%? And that figure is debatable.

In a speech in early November at the Melbourne Institute conference, which doesn’t seem to be online, she went to so far as to say that the Whitlam government had made a mistake in 1973 in not getting a referral of powers from the states when the Commonwealth took over principal financial responsibility for higher education.
Continue reading “Is higher education next?” →