Lunch With Ned Flanders - Still No Answers

I've just returned from lunch with WA Treasurer, Dr Mike Nahan, and a couple of hundred other people. The occasion was a public lecture sponsored by the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy and the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre and the topic was 'Moving towards a more effective Federation' - thanks to those two organisations for hosting this event - not to mention providing lunch.

Dr Nahan spoke at length about the damaging effect of the Federal Government's forcing change on the states (eg health funding and seniors concessions) and how these changes and aspects of the current taxation regime (most notably the fact that WA only gets 38% of the GST revenue raised in this state) work to the severe detriment of subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity is the concept that a central authority should have a subsidiary (that is, a supporting, rather than a subordinate) function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed effectively at a more immediate or local level. 

Now, it happens that I agree with much of what Dr Nahan said - but I was disturbed his lack of acknowledgment that the argument has to work both ways.

I asked him if it was not hypocritical to be requiring local governments to spend $100 million on forced local government amalgamations without any assessment of the benefits - and when experience in other parts of Australia and overseas strongly suggests that any anticipated benefits are almost entirely illusory.

His response, to the extent there was one, amounted to (a) stating that local government was no more than a part of State government (on the somewhat tenuous grounds that local government is not mentioned in the constitution) and therefore they could do whatever they liked and (b) asserting that there were substantial efficiencies to be gained - without providing any evidence to support it.

Joe Poprzeczny followed up with a question relating to broken promises on forcing amalgamations. Nahan's response was that they were not forcing local governments to amalgamate but putting pressure on them to come up changes. 

Breathtakingly, he followed this up by saying that we should not criticise them until they actually do it. This beggars the imagination. If we did that, we would rightly be criticised by the government for not speaking up during the process and told we had missed our opportunity to have a say in the process.

Reading between the verbal lines, this supports my contention that the Local Government Advisory Board will distance itself from the ministerial proposals to the greatest extent possible.

Bottom line, though, is that no matter how many times we ask the question we never get an answer on what the benefits will be.