The media don’t seem to have picked up on it yet, but the Liberal Party has a new campaign website, “Statewatch“: designed, it says, “to provide the public with an accurate, independent assessment of the performance of their State or Territory Government.”

There may be more to come, but so far Statewatch is based on a paper on state government expenditure and service delivery written by Henry Ergas for the Menzies Research Centre, the Liberal Party’s think tank. The paper was briefly mentioned last week in reports of federal council.

Ergas’s conclusions don’t seem especially devastating, but the website, not surprisingly, presents things in the most unfavorable light:

What he found is that while the States have collected increasingly more tax dollars, they have spent the money not on services or infrastructure but on higher public service salaries. The States have squandered the opportunity to achieve infrastructure reform, provide better quality, better performing services and invest in the future.

Statewatch certainly has some interesting information and, to the Liberals’ credit, it’s presented in a relatively non-sensationalist manner — although that also makes it less likely to hold the attention of the casual visitor. Perhaps the more lurid claims are being saved up for the campaign. But it’s not clear that focusing on the states is a wise political tactic.

State Labor governments may be inefficient, but they have retained electoral support extremely well. All of them bar Western Australia have been re-elected within the last 15 months, and all with substantial majorities. If Kevin Rudd can even go close to equalling the performance of his state colleagues he will win comfortably.

Presumably the federal government’s view is that Labor’s state support is soft, and its governments are only re-elected because of the hopelessness of their oppositions. But if that’s true, then talking about state governments risks reminding people of the state oppositions as well.

Since the whole strategy depends on blurring the difference between state and federal Labor, it’s not too far-fetched to think people might blur the difference on the Coalition side as well.