cam . # .

Tony, I think the NT is supported by commonwealth legislation which is why the national government can muck with them and cancel their laws.

One the issue of incomes tax, via the wayback machine:

I suspect many readers assume that the Great Commonwealth Tax Grab of the 1940s is somehow constitutionally-based and irreversible. That simply isn't the case. The taxation power is a concurrent one. The Commonwealth scheme relied in considerable part on the defence power in wartime conditions to allow it to confiscate State tax office personnel and premises to make it effectively impossible for the States to continue collecting their own income taxes. That power wouldn't be available today.

There is nothing in the Constitution to prevent the States collecting their own income taxes (or taxes on services). The reality is that, despite a lot of conspicuous, confected indignation, it has mostly suited the States quite nicely to allow the Comonwealth to be the central tax collector.

But there's been a tacit federal compact whereby the States cede that role to the Commonwealth as long as it hands sufficient revenue back in a transparent and fair manner (either through Commonwealth Grants Commision or GST formulae), and as long as the Commonwealth doesn't use its power to make tied grants under section 96 so oppressively as to utterly deny the States roles as even vaguely co-equal and sovereign federal partners.