Money is the weapon in this war

There is no doubt that the structures of government are in need of reform, but the process should not be reactive and hasty; it should be thought through and implemented with care. In any case reform should be a continuous process in response to on-going change.

Selling public assets in response to party ideology has not been in the national good.

It is hard to identify the public good in the sale of the Commonwealth Bank, a corporation which helped keep the other banks honest. In the light of the oil companies rorting motorists maybe it would have been sensible not to have sold the Commonwealth Oil Refinery (COR) to BP. Who has gained from the sale of Telstra, Qantas, CSL and water utilities? Who has gained from the private funding of road works? Who will gain if Iemma sells off electricity companies? Is it proposed to privatise the water in the Murray-Darling Basin?

Perhaps a consensus needs to develop on the role of government before structural reform is attempted.

If state government is folded into local government won’t the competition between the states be replaced by competition between local governments? And there will be a lot more local government entities than there are state governments.

If a local government area becomes Labor dominated will a Liberal federal government squeeze it for funds?

Wouldn’t an aggressive and dictatorial federal government abolish local government and appoint its own area manager arguing that the only vote that counts is for the government that collects the bulk of taxes?

Without co-operation and proper financial arrangements between the states and the commonwealth the relationship will inevitably struggle. The same would be true if the states were abolished and the commonwealth dealt directly with local government. The bottom line is that for any arrangement to work good will is required.

A commonwealth government, unconstrained by the checks imposed by the states, would only be as good as its intentions, which as we have observed with the Howard Government have not been good.

What would happen to the state courts and legal system? Would they be transferred to local government? Could they be transferred to local government? Or would the federal government take them over? Not a good idea in my opinion.

What would happen to the Senate?

A question that arises is: what greater or further abuses of power would have been achieved by Howard without the constraint offered by the states?