John Howard, if he is still Prime Minister after November 24, plans to hold a referendum to formally recognize Aboriginal Australians in the Constitution. If he survives in office and is still in a referendum mood, John Howard may want to consider throwing in a couple of extra questions, starting with one about the relevance of State and Territory Governments in today’s world fast travel and instant communications.
Australians distrust politicians who want to muck around with the Constitution.
That is why most referendums fail. An exception was the 1967 referendum which gave the Federal Government direct responsibility for Australia’s Aboriginal population.
Now the Prime Minister has decided that one way out of the political doldrums is to promise a referendum to constitutionally recognize the special status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first peoples of the nation.
He may be on a winner there, but he seems to have forgotten the rest of us. He should go for the double.
Not just Aboriginal rights, but everyone’s rights!
Stop and think for a minute about all you have seen and heard from the media recently about the performance of State and Territory Governments, including our own.
Then imagine if all Australians could vote in a referendum to modernize Government across Australia, cut kilometers of red tape, and save billions and billions of dollars?
How? By abolishing the six States and two Territory Governments.
By adopting the pre-Blair British system of one central Government, and strong shire and city Governments in the regions.
After all, the current political composition of the Australian nation is the result of a series of historical accidents.
The States started off as colonies, and then morphed into separate, self governing Colonies under the British Crown.
They ran their own trade policies, maintained customs collection points on their borders, and generally carried on like separate European countries.
The fathers of Federation found they had to make all sorts of compromises to cajole the Colonial Governments into devolving those basic ingredients of nation-building powers – defence and foreign policy – onto a central Government.
But that was in 1901, the days of horse and buggy, with no fast cars, let alone airlines and the internet.
Times have changed dramatically, and so have people’s expectations. But except for the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal affairs, the Constitution has stayed etched in concrete.
The beginning of the 21st century might be a good time to take a jackhammer to it.
A New South Wales Federal Parliamentarian, Tony Windsor, suggested the abolition of the States and Territories in August this year, when he presented the Earle Page Political Lecture at the University of New England.
Mr Windsor, an independent, chose the topic “Country Independence – the way forward” as the title of his lecture, which also warned rural voters that they should shy clear of the established parties if they wanted to exert real political influence.
“Greater independence from capital cities through the abolition of the States and Territories, and recognizing regional Governments with a clear financial structure and access to income growth would bring far better results for count
