Topics: Federalism, COAG, Safe Schools.
E&OE…
PETER VAN ONSELEN
Well I mentioned earlier, somewhat sarcastically but also seriously that I reckon the biggest geek in the Parliament when it comes to federalism would be Senator Scott, who happens also to be a Minister in his spare time. He joins us now live from Melbourne. Thanks for your company!
SCOTT RYAN
Hey, thanks Peter, I’ll take that as a compliment.
VAN ONSELEN
Yeah it’s meant as a compliment. Now look this is just I think I just said then to Professor Holden this is just the first step, you know if you were writing the dissertation then this would be the abstract, I would argue with what the Prime Minister’s laid out. Yet already you’ve got all… it’s almost like you’re the equivalent like you’re in your first meeting as a PhD student, all these supposedly learned academics sitting around you telling you what’s wrong with your idea before you’ve even had the chance to pressure test it. That’s what the state premiers seem to already be doing with the Prime Minister’s idea. Here’s my question for you Scott Ryan, if you‘re a federalist like I am, or indeed a reformist like I like to think I am, where’s the hope in modern politics?
RYAN
Well, let’s take a deep breath. I mean, COAG discussions are always partly public partly private, because the papers get distributed; there are meetings in the weeks leading up to COAG with officials and that’s happened in this case. So there’s no real need for any of the premiers to be surprised and as the Prime Minister outlined this morning, this actually flows from explicit discussions about these things at the meeting of COAG late last year. So look, there’ll be a meeting with the Prime Minister and the premiers tonight and tomorrow, there’s a meeting with the Treasurer and the state treasurers today, so let’s wait and see what comes out of that. But, you’re right to say that some people are jumping to conclusions here and the histrionics of Labor’s attempted scare campaign shows they’re into recycling, trying to recycle Neville Wran as you mentioned from 1976 when I was three years old. We’ve got to have a debate in this country around do we want to constantly have fights about these ongoing issues that as my colleagues said, go back you know, one hundred plus years where premiers complain about a lack of money; or do we want to take some serious steps to solve them? What the Prime Minister’s proposed is a serious step. Now, the state premiers and the Prime Minister will have to talk about it tomorrow. It is at that conceptual stage, it’s a well-known concept. Bob Hawke tried it and failed, Malcolm Fraser tried it and failed, but what Malcolm Turnbull’s interested in, is putting in place the provisions that will fund the services that Australians need. [inaudible] that’s hospitals and schools.
VAN ONSELEN
Let’s talk to some of that, Senator. But we just need to deal with this first up – the Tasmanian government, a liberal government no less, has already started to release what they say is some modelling that shows that Tasmanians will be worse off under this scheme, so they’re jumping straight on the negative bandwagon. We’ve heard the Victorian Premier being deliberately negative about this. Annastasia Palaszczcuk, she’s, you know, no longer trying to figure out what the rate is for the GST. She’s now decided to jump in to this one as well. Mike Baird has called a media conference for later today – he’s expected to jump in against it and he’s already made some comments to that effect. I’m with you! I think that this is something that we should be able to have an adult discussion about, particularly at an early stage like this. But it doesn’t sound to me that the premiers are up for it.
RYAN
Well look, let’s see what happens tonight and tomorrow. As the Prime Minister said, this hasn’t come as a surprise to any of them. It’s a conceptual discussion about how we can fund the services that Australians most need and to make them effective and stable over the longer term, and get past the political shouting of premiers screaming for more money that happens every year. This, I think – and the Prime Minister also made the point – that sometimes what is said publically cannot reflect private conversations, and I’m sure that when they all get together tomorrow they will have a serious discussion about this. It’s been on the table for a number of months. It’s not a surprise to them, but it’s not about a theoretical federal model, it’s actually about funding the services that people need. And we can’t keep having this screaming match where the premiers say give us more money, because the Commonwealth doesn’t have any more money. And when the Commonwealth promises to fund things with debt, that only makes those services less sustainable in the longer term.
VAN ONSELEN
Let me ask you though, we do need to see change in this space. We know that it’s worked before, I mean we had this in place pre-1942 when the bombing of Darwin had a small impact on the psyche around taxation in the war effort. And then it stayed that way and federalism has been eroded ever since, quite frankly, including by your side of politics. Federalism is an inherently conservative concept, but it’s also a very liberal concept via competition and competitiveness between states. Would you expect conservatives and liberals, I suppose if I can put it that way, to get on board? I mean this is the very sort of policy the Samuel Griffith society has long been advocating.
RYAN
Look, this is one of the examples where you see premiers come to Canberra and they quite rightly represent their state rather than their party, at least on our side of politics in particular. So, I’m not going to be critical of what they say publically, but if the states aren’t willing to step up and seriously consider a model that gives them financial sustainability and financial responsibility for the services they deliver, then their criticism in the future about a lack of money are going to be taken with a grain of salt.
VAN ONSELEN
[Interrupts]…Are they though? I mean I hope they are, but are they really going to? Because I think that’s what we’re going to see. We’re going to see state premiers that are quite happy, Senator Scott Ryan, to turn around and say ‘No, no, no. We don’t want responsibility for all that scary stuff like whether we put taxes up to fund our services. We’d rather just get the money from you lot when you’ve had to make the tough calls around tax reform, like what John Howard had to do on the GST’ and then just say ‘hey great, you beauty, now we’ll just spend it and try to claim credit when services are looking good, and when services look bad we’ll just, you know, bleat and moan about Canberra not giving us enough money.’RYAN
One of the most frustrating things as a federal politician is when people come into your office and you have to explain that that’s a state issue, that’s a local issue, that’s a federal issue. I can tell you that the federal-state tension, the fact that the states blame the federal government for things and sometimes they may well be right, but often it’s just about money, that frustrates people. And what the Prime Minister’s done is actually say, this is not a silver bullet. It’s not going to solve all the problems, but it’s a significant step along the way to solving some of the problems. We know that if we make health services funded on a financially sustainable basis, a predictable basis, then the states can budget, hospitals can plan, community hospital boards can decide what are the emerging health issues in their area. As we saw this morning, we can better plan for chronic care that could see hundreds of thousands of unnecessary hospital visits avoided each and every year. But none of these issues are simple to resolve. If it was as simple as just writing a larger cheque, then someone would have done it beforehand. But the money isn’t there. The Commonwealth can’t afford to borrow continually to fund state government services today. It’s simply not sustainable. Labor hasn’t come up with a plan to actually increase the funding to hospitals. They’ve made no commitment on it whatsoever and their commitment on schools is funded by a dodgy tobacco tax that even the Parliamentary Budget Office says is an estimate of low reliability. So this is about giving states an independent financial base, and it’ll be interesting to see what they talk about tomorrow. I’m sure a lot of them are interested in it.
VAN ONSELEN
What I fundamentally don’t like is this idea that there is no incentive under the current federal-state power sharing arrangements, particularly in health but also to a lesser extent in education. There is no incentive, or not much incentive, on state governments to be more efficient in their offering, because that efficiency which would therefore lower the costs, would simply give an incentive to Canberra to direct less money to that state. You need to fix that. That’s part of this, surely.
RYAN
And that’s a long-standing problem. I remember in the Kennett government, the Kennett government made services more efficient, and then got its grants reduced under the Commonwealth grants commission. There’s an important role for fiscal equalisation because in the end it’s about how individuals and families access things like health services and schools. And so we don’t want to see them necessarily punished with worse services because they’ve got an intransigent state government that won’t undertake reform. But there need to be incentives in the system that ensure there are rewards for those governments that do undertake reform. We wouldn’t have national activity-based hospital funding, if it wasn’t for the changes Jeff Kennett brought in 1993. It took twenty years, but that then became national policy. That experimentation is very important because it leads to better national policy outcomes.
VAN ONSELEN
One very quick final question: when you had a different cap on as a Parliamentary Secretary under the Abbott Prime Ministership, you launched the Safe Schools program. It’s now been adjusted. Were you wrong?
RYAN
Look, without going into a great deal of detail, I expressed a number of concerns privately and publically – in fact at the launch I did actually express some concerns about it when I launched it – but as you know, Peter, as a Parliamentary Secretary you do what your boss says and that’s one of the tasks I had in that role.
VAN ONSELEN
Alright, fair enough. Senator Scott Ryan, appreciate you joining us for News Day, thanks for your company.
RYAN
Thanks Peter.
(ENDS)