COAG Meets in Darwin and Paul Everingham scrubs the States

COAG met in Darwin on July 2.

The previous day – Territory Day - the NT News reported comments from the ‘father of Self Government’ Paul Everingham which said that states and territories were a waste of taxpayer money and that the Northern Territory should be run out of Canberra.

He was reported as saying that when self-government for the NT was granted 31 years ago:

‘Back then people were still getting telegrams…but communication has improved. It is the internet age. People can also fly everywhere on relatively cheap airlines'.

This is a more earthy way in expressing something we have mentioned in an earlier article:

Many will say the Seamless Economy Project is good idea - Australia is an integrated common market, with people and companies commonly undertaking activities across state borders.

Moreover, Australia exists in a globalised world, with the complication of different rules in different states a reason not
to come to Australia.Regulatory difference is nothing more than a mere compliance cost that distort allocative efficiency with no public benefit.

The majority of the COAG decisions appear to underline the Everingham view of the world.

Those decisions include:

1. the development of a national regulatory body for vocational education and training;
   
2. the development of a unified national system of child care licensing;
   
3. the Coordinator-General mechanisms set up by the Commonwealth to take responsibility for Nation Building programs and projects funded by the Commonwealth and delivered by the States under the Building Australia Fund, the Education Investment Fund and the Health and Hospitals Fund;
   
4. the creation of national regulation for maritime safety, rail safety and heavy vehicles, including the appointment of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority as the national safety regulator for all commercial shipping in Australian waters and a single national heavy vehicle regulator; and
   
5. the development of national performance measures for development applications (DA).
   

Quite a list really for one COAG, really.

And there are other Ministerial Councils working on uniform legislation.

For instance, the Standing Committee of Attorney-Generals (SCAG) is working on the issue of whether there should be a national regulator for the legal profession, as well as on uniform succession laws on administration of estates of deceased persons.

This followed a debate immediately before the Darwin COAG as to whether the Federal Government should take over the administration of the hospitals system.

The time is coming where an overt (rather than a covert) decision should be made as to whether Australia is to be a federation or a unitary nation.