NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has moved to make permanent the structural shift in power from Canberra to the states that has resulted from the pandemic and Scott Morrison’s leadership failures.
In the most important political speech this year, Perrottet told the National Press Club yesterday of his desire to cement the enhanced power of the states by reforming the states-only Council for the Australian Federation into a major national policymaking body that will exclude the Commonwealth and work to present a united front against Canberra on reform issues.
Perrottet wants to transform the existing premiers-only Council for the Australian Federation into the engine room of policy and reform in Australia “as a vehicle for proactive, state-driven leadership, and reform from the frontline”. It will be based on his experience with the states-only Board of Treasurers where he found: “I have more in common with my Labor counterparts at a state level than a Coalition treasurer at a federal level.”
And in Perrottet’s view, the Commonwealth is the enemy of good policymaking. He said the Commonwealth would benefit from his land tax reforms in NSW, while it would leave his state out of pocket, and the Commonwealth had shut down discussion of state-based income taxes at the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). But the Board of Treasurers had ensued that “rather than picking states off, the Commonwealth government on many issues is now confronted with a strong unified voice”.
He also flagged greater pressure on NSW senators to support reform, noting that on GST changes he “wrote to every NSW Liberal and National senator, and reminded them of their obligation to stand up for their state, not their political party”.
Perrottet’s vision of reformist states overriding a reluctant, obstructive Commonwealth is a natural evolution of the centrifugal reallocation of power from Canberra to the states that occurred as a result of the pandemic, which made states the dominant shapers of national policy in pandemic response. It also exposed the delivery incapacity of Morrison and his government, which ignored the issue of quarantine facilities and badly bungled both the sourcing and rollout of vaccines (which drew a quip at Morrison’s expense from Perrottet).
It’s also the natural consequence of the particular failures of Morrison as prime minister. Morrison has proved incapable of leadership, delivering no economic reforms of note and abandoning the field on climate and energy policy beyond trying to prop up fossil fuel companies. It has been state governments — led by NSW under Gladys Berejiklian, Perrottet and now-Treasurer Matt Kean — who have progressed climate and renewables policy in Australia, setting far more ambitious targets on emissions abatement and ramping up investment in renewables.
It was always possible that the Morrison-era loss of power from the Commonwealth to the states would be reversed after the pandemic finished, or Morrison was replaced with a prime minister prepared to lead. But it would only ever take one activist premier with the determination to prevent a return to the status quo ante to mean long-term change was a reality and Canberra would begin playing a supporting role to state capitals on reform.
Agreement among the states is famously like herding cats, and Perrottet is likely to find his Labor counterparts less receptive if Labor returns to power in Canberra. But the continuation of Morrison’s “don’t-do government” would set the scene for a historic shift unseen since the Hawke-Keating-Greiner COAG reform era of the early 1990s, and possibly the biggest change since World War II.
Note, too, that Perrottet bluntly rejected criticisms from Morrison and his followers of the NSW ICAC: “ICAC in NSW plays a very important role in preventing corruption and uncovering corruption. What we should be doing is instilling confidence, not taking it away.”
That’s as unsubtle a hint at Morrison as his line that the vaccine rollout “may not have started off as a race”.
It was already clear Perrottet was no big fan of Morrison. But now he seems intent on making him irrelevant.
Would you like to see the states have more power — or do we just need a stronger prime minister? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name if you would like to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say column. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Perotet’s national press club address was important, as Bernard says, but I would still give the prize of most important of the year to his treasurer, Matt Kean. The latter is as far from a follower of the “drag the chain on replacing fossil fuels as much as you can” strategy of the Federal Coalition as you can get and was showing that a bipartisan policy on generational justice is possible. Morrison and Joyce pretend there is really nothing to worry about but the scientific evidence is clear that preserving profits from fossil fuels means putting the wealth, incomes and standard of living of present generations unjustly ahead of the prospects of future generations.
Perotet’s views suffer from being too neo-liberal. What is best in an unrealisable model of a market economy whipped up with mathematical imagination in the 1950s tells us nothing about what is best in real world economies and it is time that economists and especially politicians stopped pretending that it does.
Otherwise, as Bernard says, Perotet showed what an unprincipled, rag-tag, opportunistic, “do nothing”, no vision beyond holding their seats the Federal Coalition is.
Not Neo- Liberal he is an Alt-Right Neo-Con adherent to a barely tolerated patriarchal cult of the Catholic church.
But that’s just putting him in a labelled box and already he’s jumped out of that box. This speech, and allowing a conscience vote on Assisted Dying legislation in NSW, are examples. And simply putting the PM into a box where the PM belongs, is admirable for a Lib Premier, along with Matt Kean’s good examples. No fanfare, no Marketing Spin, just getting on sensibly with the important things.
Do you really think that Perrottet wanted to give a conscience vote for voluntary euthanasia?
Or are you seeing a man who has enough political nous to know that a leadership spill would be on the cards , if he interfered?
He views the World Bank, his father works for, as a Socialist organization, does that help you to define him?
Unfortunately, we have heard and seen too much of him already and all I can say is iCare.
♪♪Memories…♪♪
Matt Kean for PM ?
Yes, he has clearly been the most articulate and impressive Liberal in the country over the past 12 months or so! Of course that is not saying much but he shows up Scamo and his ilk every time. Perhaps he is the true ‘modern Liberal’! Just remember that he must be making a lot of enemies ( within Liberal ranks) and could not be trusted when he goes Federal into a safe North Shore seat! Too late for 2022!
Dominic emerges as the anti-hero! Could 2021 get any more weird. Even the staunchest Libs no they have a dud in Scomo. What confuses me is why Scomom wanted the job, given he doesn’t seem to want to do the job. He is the pinup boy for dogs who caught the car.
*know
Kirribilli House, a private jet, 9 months of not turning up for work and still getting paid, 10 whole working days planned for 2022.
Was there a job attached to the title of Prime Minimal?
Well, Perrottet makes several very telling points and sets out a good case for the Commonwealth being more hindrance than help. The gist of his message to the Commonwealth reminds me of a line from an old Peter Cook sketch where an employer says to one of his staff something like, “I really don’t know how we’d manage without you. But we’re going to try.”
Perhaps the results would restore the balance between states and Commonwealth to something like that intended when the constitution was written, with the Commonwealth taking its grubby paws off matters that ought not concern it on a simple reading of the division of responsibilities. Whether that would be a good outcome for Australia is a different question.
Precisely! Until the engineers case in 1920 the power balance favoured the states. The federal government was supposed to be the minor player. Now all we need is proportional representation and we might become a real democracy.
The origin of Federation was a tug o’war between labour & republicans and the squatocracy, their servants and commercialists, incipient capitalists when not remittance men from the wrong side of the blanket.
The parliament was constituted to enact instructions from the Mother Country, specifically the Home Office and try at all costs to stifle independent ideas, especially strategic & foreign policy.
So far, apart from the odd blip or ten – little things like conscription for World Wars, Empire Preferred which gifted us a far more severe Depression that, given the nation’s resources, natural, human and financial need never have occurred – it has been working as planned.
I LOVE your apt Peter Cook line. We’ll do more than “try” to get along without him!
When asked why, having done nothing for the 4yrs that he has been PM, he wanted another term, he answered “Because I haven’t finished yet!”
Of course, the chances are that he was lying.
An interesting article, but I take exception at the comment that NSW is leading the way on renewable energy. Is this an Eastern States centric view of the world?
South Australia embraced the challenge of renewables DECADES ago under the Labor govt and is leading the world. We averaged 62% renewsble energy electricity generation last year and recently powered the SA grid 100% from JUST rooftop solar. We regularly export renewable ebergy to the eastern states. We had the world’s largest grid scale battery which has proved the technical capabilites and is now being copied around Australia.
If the states indeed “take control”, then the “everything important is East of the Great Dividing Range” attitude must disappear and state vs state disasters like the Murray Darling Basin must be prevented. Here we have seen science ignored at the expense of the river system, whilst water licences have been tirned into a speculative investment like shates. Transferring water allocations between rivers regardless of water availability or environmental considerations is a disastrous approach.
The Feds have indeed become an impediment to progress under do nothing Morrison, but there are some areas where self interest of states MUST be overriden .
And don’t forget here in the ACT we’ve had net zero emission electricity for over two years.
Pity about all the hot air pollution from the Hole-in-the-Hill.
Stands the clock at quarter three and is the Cotter still as free as when Jim Cairns & Ms Morosi attended, circa 1976?
As a South Aussie…I say very well said, Pauline. Isn’t it wonderful how much adulation ensues when one of the larger eastern states finally catches up with us. You would think it was all their own work!!
I still fondly remember a prat named Friedenberg going to S.A babbling about renewable energy being unreliable and getting savaged by Jay Wetherill..
Like the rest of us, Perrottet must have been watching the Canberra circus ever since Clownshoes put on his his laughing suit.