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Costello and the Role Reversal

Tuesday, 4th July, 2006

It is a rare event these days for a politician and a journalist to chat on the record for half an hour with the journalist happy to let the politician talk without point scoring interruptions. There’s a chance under this format that we might actually learn something about what our ruler really thinks.

And so it was last Sunday when Treasurer Peter Costello appeared on ABC radio’s Sunday Profile with Julia Baird. There was none of the normal pushiness from the interviewer and none of the normal evasiveness from the politician. Peter Costello had the chance to talk about the things he wanted to.
It surprised me that the issue at the top of his list for action was federalism. In the interview it came up in this fashion:

JULIA BAIRD:

You've long spoken of the need to get a third generation into Liberal leadership. In many ways, at 48, you represent a different generation to John Howard, and not just because you watched television as a kid. If your generation took over the helm of government entirely, how would political life be different?

PETER COSTELLO:

I think everyone brings to political questions their own background, their own perspectives.

JULIA BAIRD:

What would yours bring?

PETER COSTELLO:

I think federalism has to be completely recast in this country.

JULIA BAIRD:

In what way?

PETER COSTELLO:

Oh, I don't think it works. I don't think federalism is working for Australia.

JULIA BAIRD:

So we need to decentralise.

PETER COSTELLO:

We've got to go one of two ways: We've got to either get the states behaving like sovereign governments and taking responsibility for decisions and finances, or if we're going to go increasingly to a national perspective we've got to ensure that service delivery which is done by states is done on a much more effective basis. Federalism was good for the time in 1900, but is failing Australia now.

JULIA BAIRD:

Isn't that what Whitlam thought as well?

PETER COSTELLO:

He had some ideas about regional government, which didn't work too well. But you can either go back and try and make federalism work with sovereign state governments taking more responsibility, or you can move, as I believe we will, to a national framework, with states increasingly becoming service deliverers, working more as partners to federal or national objectives.

This was the clearest statement so far by a senior Coalition Cabinet minister that there is no end in sight for the expansion of central power. What has already started under Prime Minister John Howard would continue even more quickly under a Prime Minister Peter Costello.

Gough Whitlam certainly would be pleased at State Governments becoming mere administrators of schools and hospitals and the auditors of local councils. Stripping powers from the States was a Labor policy objective for nigh on half a century.

Not that it is any more if Kim Beazley’s silence on the issue is anything to go by. Mr Beazley, with his well known courage for leadership, has stepped aside so that the Labor leaders of the eight state and territory governments can grandstand about the need to protect states rights.