The Abolish the States Collective is an advocacy group which, consistent to their name, wants the states abolished and replaced with a national government and regional government - with the latter either being the equivalent of current local government, or super-local bodies such as the Brisbane City Council [BCC]. There is also a round-up/reply by John August on Online Opinion.
In their principles they state that:
We believe state governments are divisive, the source of destructive "bidding wars" and "buck-passing", wasteful in their duplication, and an enormous cost burden generally which Australia can ill afford in an increasingly competitive world. We believe that everything state governments do could be done better at either the national government level or at a level closer to the people than state governments are in their present form. We believe that Australia needs a single, effective national government which would assume most of the powers and responsibilities held by the present state and federal governments. We also believe our national government should administer uniform national laws, but we endorse flexibility in the local application of such laws.This is quite popular amongst the current federal parties. Howard has pretty much said that if he got to do Australia over again, he would have the model of a national government and then large regional local government. The BCC is usually used as the example of a big regional local government, but it is in a major city, and has a budget of approximately one billion. By comparison NSW has a budget just over thirty billion. So the scale between state and local government is quite drastic. In a research paper Scott Bennett wrote that the constitution was written up by regional politicians with the purpose of protecting their old colonies under a federal system. He also notes that attempts to centralise through referendum and undermine this structure have been spectacularly unsuccessful. The main problem with the Australian Constitution is not its federal structure which I consider a strength especially in a market-state, but the issue has been that the organisational structure has been nationalised by fiat. The use of fiat is a bad word as there has been no consipiracy behind it, however, the actions of the Federal Government, the High Court, and the weakness of the states to act in their independent interests have all led to parliamentary practices that are hostile to the principles of federalism. An obvious example is that the Federal Government does 85% of all taxation in Australia. Half of the NSW budget comes from the Federal Government. This is repugnant in a federalist system, as a guiding principle is that a government should only raise as much tax revenue as it needs to support itself and nothing more, yet the tax system has been nationalised. The duplication of services, taxation and appropriations has been because the national government has muscled in on the states. And all branches in the federal government - the legislative, executive and judicial have been complicit in this. If there is a body in our system which could be dynamited; it is the federal government. We have seen several trends in the last twenty years which probably put the ASC on the wrong side of the argument now, and that is that the cost of being a nation-state is decreasing. Largely because of apolitical institutions such as the Reserve Bank, floated dollar, etc and the agreeance that free trade is superior to protectionism. Those have helped reduce the cost and load of 'being' a country at the national level. The EU has used this effect to accelerate the economic growth of small nations by the EU reducing the burden of maintaining a currency and enabling a free trade zone within their boundaries. It is often forgotten that one of the benefits of Federation in 1901 was that it made a free trade zone on the Australian continent. Prior to 1901, NSW had been the only free-trade colony. The rest were protectionist; and while the Federal Governments of Alfred Deakin were protectionist, NSW got unabridged access to the markets of the other colonies with federation. Daniel Bell commented in 1978:
The nation-state is now too small for the big problems of life. And too big for the small problems in life.The states should be where the most power is, and the national government should be little more than the public interface for international relations; treaties, legislative and politics. National government is too unitary for modern globalised demands and is a structural weakness that adds inefficiencies into a market-state due to its existence and dominance. There is a need for a national government, but it should be small and purely of international focus. Its only domestic concerns should be that capital, goods and labor can move between the states without hindrance.
