Handing the current Federal environmental oversight and protection powers to the State Premiers?
I’ve just deleted an overly long and ranty paragraph on why that’s such a terrible idea. GetUp has a decent summary, and is asking for donations to run an ad attacking this craptastic plan, reminding the electorate that if it weren’t for the protection of the Federal government, we would have lost places like the Great Barrier Reef, the Franklin River, the Daintree Rainforest and Fraser Island a long time ago.
This is a very very bad idea for so many reasons.
One of the reasons being that Australia really shouldn’t have states. Too much waste in duplicating the bureaucracies with no real benefits, AFAICT.
Most state govts (party is irrelevant) have shown over and over and over that they can’t be trusted on environmental issues.
Except that the smaller states would never agree to state governments being removed. They’ve seen what happens to regional centres within states and that’s what would happen to capital cities in small states with only a federal and local government.
What I don’t understand about this decision by the ALP is why – surely there’s not many votes in it for them? There have been much more controversial issues that they haven’t backed down on.
Agree with Chris – without the state government having their separate powers smaller states would wither, and in any case we wouldn’t have a federation that included them in the first place, as they wouldn’t have agreed to join (just as New Zealand, in the end, decided not to join our Federation – they were invited and they did consider it).
That doesn’t mean that existing Federal oversight powers should be simply handed off, especially the environmental powers. I’m encouraged by this morning’s news coverage which mentions that “some say” the govt’s deeper examination of the proposal since the last meeting about it has revealed possibly intractable incompatibilities between the different State systems which might make a handover impractical. It sounds to me like the stage is being set for some back-pedaling on a bad decision.
I admit I don’t really have a good understanding of exactly what power the Federal government has. If its normal that people need to submit separate and different environmental submissions to both federal and state governments that seems like wasteful duplication. If its simply that the Federal government has rarely used oversight that is only used when it looks like the State government process is significantly flawed then that’s ok with me.