Centralism by stealth

This work occurs in committees and working groups that support COAG.

At its meeting of 26 March 2008, the Council endorsed an implementation plan from its Business Regulation and Competition Workgroup.

It was decided that legislation needs to be "harmonised" (made the same), or a national system created in the following areas:

occupational health and safety, environmental assessment and approvals, payroll tax administration, rail safety legislation, consumer affairs, planning and development approvals, construction, business names, personal property securities, mine safety, wine labelling, director's responsibilities, crude oil and natural gas projects involving more than one jurisdiction and maritime safety for commercial vessels.

The Commonwealth is to take over full regulatory responsibility for trustee companies and mortgage advice, margin lending and lending by non-deposit taking institutions. The possibility of a national authority for mine safety was also mooted.

Other committees that work under COAG are moving to harmonise legislation with the same assiduity.

For instance, the Weekend Australian of 3-4 May 2008 reports that following a meeting of Transport Ministers, it was decided that Australia's truckies will come under one national registration scheme, a reform that Transport Minister Anthony Albenese said:

… is about delivering on the Rudd Labor Government's commitment to modernising our century old federation and building a seamless national economy for the 21st century.

This follows on from the previous Government's attempts to centralise decision making in areas ranging from health to education to industrial relations.

So much "harmonisation" in such a small space of time!

Now, the (few) supporters of a federal system argue that citizens benefit where there is genuine "competitive federalism" –the idea that different jurisdictions will make different rules and regulations and have different levels of taxation, with each jurisdiction ultimately picking up what is "best practice" or face the loss of people and investment.

A similar argument is one holding that States are "incubators of innovation" –a place where different ideas can be tried, with the good ones taken up in the bad ones discarded - and if an idea is a really bad, the entire nation doesn’t have to face the consequences.