Of all the reversals and surprises for which the Prime Minister has been reproached over his political career, his change of heart on federalism must be the largest and most striking.She then writes:
In 2009, when he wrote Battlelines, Tony Abbott was so convinced that the Commonwealth should be given more power to override state governments that he wrote his own Constitutional amendment to that effect and pasted it in the back of the book.
The failure of federalism, he wrote, was the key to many of Australia's worst problems. And people expected their national government to fix things, so the Constitution's fiendish section 51, with its pernickety and much-mulled-over list of things the Commonwealth is allowed to interfere with, should be simplified to give the Feds power to overrule the states on pretty much anything.
"Giving more authority and commensurate revenue powers back to the states is an option, but it is not a real one," Mr Abbott argued in a speech to a 2008 conference, Australian Federalism: Rescue and Reform.
"It is an implausible one in the modern era. The only real option I suggest is to give the national government the power to match people's expectations about who should really be in charge."
One of the most mystifying yet persistent characterisations currently abroad in the Australian political arena is that the Prime Minister is some kind of obsessive ideologue.Well, I agree. He's not an ideologue: he's a flake who is currently under the influence of obsessive ideologues.
Some of the definitions of flake from Urban Dictionary:
An unreliable person
A useless, shady, deceitful person who is so unreliable and selfish they cause you much anger and frustration. A Flake's only agenda is what they want to do.
A Frequently unreliable person who says that they will do somthing or attend somthing, but never shows.
3 comments:
How's the transfer to Newstart going Steve?
sorry Steve but you are biased.Abbott is merely following a whole of of PMs who are utterly pragmatic.
His problem is that he can't sell his message because no-one believes him. Just like Gillard actually.
The only PM I can think of who stuck to his ideological guns was Chifley and 1949 showed he narrowly lost!
take Climate change . Abbott has had more positions on that than the Kama Sutra!
No Homer, I don't agree.
In my view, Abbott's former pro Canberra view was the pragmatic approach - seeking to solve inter government problems by centralising control.
His current view is, at best, opportunist, in that he figures maybe he can solve Federal budget issues by abandoning Federal contribution to delivery of services and letting the States work out how to get the money. And this is supported by the "small government at any cost" twits of the IPA and CIS with their fanciful ideas of competitive Federalism, which we already know from the experience of a few decades in the later half of the 20th century doesn't work out so great.
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