The Australian History Summit was recently held by the Commonwealth Government in order to strengthen teaching of history in schools. Public schooling remains a State based responsibility so this can reasonably be viewed as an anti-federalist imposition by the federal government. However, there was some interesting comments by Paul Kelly on the Insiders which leads the question to be asked; in the current environment where governments are heavily entrenched at the federal and state levels, is the real opposition to the state governments the federal government and vice versa?

The Insiders is a politics as sport style television show, which to be quite honest normally bores me, however as an amateur historian who has produced several hundred pages of history since 1997 on the Australian Flying Corps page , as well as this site with a strong interest in Australian political and global constitutional history, I am intrigued by people's view of history in a national and public setting.

Paul Kelly commented on the history summit quickly dismissing that it was about a conservative-nationalist or anti-federalist agenda. But the fact is he casts it as a combative federal-states issue;

it's quite clear that the teaching of history and Australian history in our schools has fallen into gross disrepair; the present situation is most inadequate.

Now, if the states want to defend this, then they will have to defend what I think is a grossly inadequate situation, and the more these school curriculum are put on the bar of public opinion, the more they're analysed, then I think the more the states will be embarrassed and the more public opinion will turn against the states.

Which bunks any dismissal of the anti-federalist view. The more curious comment however was;

The reason the Commonwealth has intervened in this issue, the reason the Commonwealth wants to get involved, is because it's quite clear there is a significant problem.

And the documents make this quite clear. I think that, over time, if this debate does continue with some sort of confrontation, public opinion is likely to move behind the Commonwealth and also, the Commonwealth has got the force of intellectual argument behind it.

In a federal system the opposition to a state government that is neglecting its duties is the opposition party in the state parliament. However we are seeing the situation where the opposition to a state government is the federal government itself.

Shouldn't it be the opposition parties that are raising the issue of history being under-taught in the state schools, pointing out a deficiency in state governance?

Where are the opposition parties in the state parliaments? Why are they not doing their job? Are they unable to? Do they lack the media platform that the federal government has to shine a light on these issues?

Is this just more centralisation and anti-federalism? Yet we have seen many of the state Premiers act more as an opposition to the federal government than we have the opposition party in the federal parliament.

Is the parliamentary opposition so completely feebled by the politico-media system that they just have to wait patiently in the hope for a drover's dog election? Is this the entropy in a waitocracy?

Too many questions, and none of them bode well for the state of democracy in Australia.

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More Reading on History summit

• History Summit
• The Insiders
• Paul Kelly
• Anti-federalism
• States
• Who Is The Political Opposition?