John Rolfe: Let’s fix the federation, PM
From disease outbreaks to energy policy, Canberra’s hands are uncomfortably tied, writes John Rolfe.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Consumers have their own big stick when it comes to power
- We’ll beat climate change with tech not taxes, PM says
Our federation isn’t working. It has become outdated. Increasingly, Canberra and the states are at odds. The crazy conflict in advice over the coronavirus is the latest evidence.
But recent events have provided so much more.
Scott Morrison should show leadership and smash the reset button. We would all benefit from it.
The world has changed an awful lot since the 1890s when referendums were held in each of the six self-governing British colonies we now refer to as states.
By setting up a federal government, the colonies were agreeing to give up some of their own powers.
But they retained a lot, too.
What they retained may have made sense more than 100 years ago. Does it today?
On Wednesday, NSW and West Australian parents were advised to keep their children out of school if they had been in China in the past fortnight.
But South Australia, Victoria and Queensland said only those kids displaying symptoms, or who had had direct exposure, should remain at home.
That’s what the federal government and the chief medical officer were saying, too.
Victoria’s Education Minister James Merlino was spot-on when he said “any advice that contradicts this clear and expert medical advice creates confusion and frustration”.
That’s what the NSW government did for families.
This week it emerged that the NSW government had failed to complete 20 water resource plans for the Murray-Darling Basin.
As a result, millions of dollars of funding was being withheld by the federal government.
The Murray-Darling is arguably the clearest example of how the states can be more of a hindrance than help, because they all have their own agendas.
Is that good for the system? Of course not.
Energy isn’t far behind water.
There is a ludicrous degree of divergence in the states’ approaches to power. Their motivations are as much political as anything else.
State Labor governments have set higher renewable-energy targets. Prior to being booted out in 2018, South Australia’s then-Labor regime gave its people the most unreliable and intermittent power-generation system in the nation.
When the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing, the Festival State was reliant on getting energy from elsewhere, which left it highly susceptible.
So when Victoria’s Hazelwood coal-fire generator closed in 2017, a price shock ensued in SA.
The work to shore up SA is far from finished. Earlier this month the Australian Energy Regulator approved a $1.5 billion plan to connect the SA and NSW grids. Most of the cost is borne by NSW; most of the benefit goes to SA.
The latest Australian Energy Market Commission retail electricity price trends report, published last month, shows South Australians pay nearly 38c per kilowatt hour — 7c more than in NSW.
You’ll struggle to find anywhere in the world where electricity is more expensive than in SA.
Still on energy, the PM this week declared “we need to get the gas from under our feet’’.
Let’s see how that goes.
Morrison said it would be at least a decade until the technology was ready to allow green power to take over from traditional sources of power generation.
Until then, “gas has a critical role to play, as a backstop to our record investment in renewable energy generation”, the prime minister went on to underline.
But some states have bans on gas exploration, including NSW.
As the wise head Rod Sims of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has said, these bans have pushed up prices.
That’s sent some manufacturers out of business.
Still, it must also be acknowledged that the deal between Canberra and Macquarie Street we’ve revealed elsewhere today is a positive.
The bushfire crisis has been yet another example of where there’s been a sub-par outcome because of the divisions between state and federal governments.
The Defence Force would have become involved sooner were it not for the fact that, as things stand, the feds have to wait for a state request before providing help.
So navy ships that left Sydney Harbour at the height of the crisis went straight past people stranded on the south coast and instead evacuated people from Mallacoota, in Victoria.
The PM has flagged his intention to change the law to be able to declare a national state of emergency.
That’s a start.
But as my examples show, the problem is so much bigger. Will he have the courage to tackle that?
We must know more from China
Could ScoMo & Co be any more complimentary of China over its coronavirus communications?
“I want to thank the Chinese government for the very transparent way they have been dealing with not just the Australian government, but with all of those missions and we greatly appreciate it,” the Prime Minister said on Wednesday.
China. Transparency. They are words rarely seen together without “lack of” being in close proximity.
I asked Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne on Monday to describe the assistance Australia has received from China.
She replied: “The Chinese authorities are very, very strongly engaged with international counterparts both through the health system itself in China, through our embassy, through the consulate in Shanghai and officials to officials here in Australia. They have been forthcoming and very engaged in terms of our need to provide information to our own community.”
But as Payne noted, Australia does not have any consular presence in Wuhan. So how can we know the Chinese are being transparent?
This gushing praise is not convincing. After all, if Beijing has things so under control, why are we evacuating Australian citizens and residents who want to go?
China controls what its own people know. So it seems like a good idea to assume that is also controlling what Australians know.
Anti-Semitic nurses are victims of hateful ideology
The Bankstown nurses, victims of a culture fuelled by extremist propaganda that dehumanises all Jews, are not the originators of this disease – merely the symptom, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Smell the roses with your besties — just not the $200 ones
Celebrate the love in your life by cherishing your besties this Valentine’s Day. It’s a time to smell the roses — just not the commercialised ones, writes Lisa Mayoh.