dv said:
I’m not going to say too much about the USA. Their political system has a lot of problems, some of which are tied up with the Federal/State relationship. There’s no change in a trillion years that the US will abolish states, though, as there is a tremendous amount of historical and cultural regional variation that that just doesn’t exist in Australia. There’s more diversity within_ Australian states than between them.
The arguments for abolishing the state governments mainly fall into 3 categories.
A) Financial. The immediate cost of running an extra layer of administration that is largely replicating a higher layer is large but is not the end of the story. There are burdens of having different health, building and safety regulations, schooling, even some labelling and packaging regulations, add internal friction to the economy. In 2004 the total annual financial cost caused by having the middle tier of government was estimated at $40 billion.
B) Buck passing. The overlapping areas of responsibility in health, education, the environment etc mean that state and federal governments always have somewhere to point the finger.
C) Regulatory confusion and hassle for companies and individuals because of legislative contrast, from permitting to driving laws to emissions. Having a unified set of national laws would make things easier and simpler.
You can add to that malaportionment. The federal system means people from smaller states are overrepresented in the Senate. It is also the case that State governments have tended to be a cesspool of corruption though I don’t have any real proof that corruption would be lower under an alternative system.
It could be argued that all of these things could be fixed within the current Federal system but they have had one hundred and twenty fucking years. What reason is there to think these issues will be fixed soon?
If advantage of having state governments is that you have another pole of power in the event that the Federal government becomes tyrannical or just incompetent. Personally I tend to favour models that use smaller regional authorites.
I don’t pretend to have the level of knowledge or understanding that you do about these things.
However, let me raise two points:
1) Ambulances
2) closing the borders in times of COVID.
Every state has different systems for who pays for an ambulance. In Qld, the state govt pays. In NSW (and other states), user pays unless they have private health + ambulance cover. By abolishing states, how does the fed govt come to a suitable agreement to benefit the majority?
Although Australia has had relatively few cases of COVID, closing state borders has helped protect against the spread. If there weren’t state borders, what are your thoughts on how the virus would/could have spread? NT and SA shut their borders quickly and have more-or-less eradicated it from their areas. NSW and Vic didn’t, and cases there took a long time slowing, and of course we’re now seeing a spike in Victorian cases. I’m also aware that higher population = higher cases. Since there’s only like 10 people in NT, they were never going to get thousands of cases.
