Robotic Democrat idea #101 - Revolution Part 2 - Abolishment of the States

I have noticed that many grammatical errors have crept into my last blog. Its concerning and undermines the point i am trying to make. I'll make a concerted effort to minimise such errors in future blogs. Anyway;

Introduction
We discussed the elimination of self segregation in the last blog. You may have noticed that part of the idea hinges on the ability to control housing and education across state boarders. Housing and Education are state concerns, and this presents us with an issue in many areas. Lets ignore performance for the moment and look at principals. Our Department of Human services arm of the government is a non centralised. The goals and rules of each department are separate and do not align with each other. Do we as a country want the role of the community services protecting children and families to be different depending on which state you currently happen to be residing in? Should a child in the Northern Territory and a child in New South Wales be entitled to the same protections? The answer has to be yes. How about Education. Should a child educated in the ACT be entitled to the same quality of education as a child educated in Tasmania? The answer has to be yes.

What about Hospitals? Should a patient that is treated in a South Australian hospital be entitled to the same level of care as a patient in a Victorian hospital. The examples go on an on. Why are we permitting the states to run services that have a national priority. This undermines our concept of a fair go. To extend this concept from a principled stance to a practical one, what the hell is going on with our transport system. A person travelling on public transport with a student card in Victoria is not entitled to use their ticket or concessions on any public transport system in New South Wales. Why? the ticket is paid for. The concession legitimately approved.

Why does a young driver in Western Australia who is bared from driving at night (therefore has no night experience), who is only required to attain 25 hours of driving experience, permitted to drive in victoria where not only would that person have to be 18, but attain 120 hours of driving experience. The 17 year old unskilled driver can drive on complicated Melbourne CBD streets, streets that phase even established drivers.

The question is, why do we have so many of these universal services being managed by states? There is no good reason. We are limited by the text of the Australian constitution which was designed for a time where a federal government would not have the technical capacity or knowledge to manage such things.

Abolishment of the states
So we have indicated that the states require abolishment. So what do we put in its place. Do we have a simple national government leading the charge in every area, imposing generalist rules onto every region. Well that's obviously not better than the system we have now. The function of the states should be fractured into regions. collections of local government control centralised into larger and more powerful regional government. The magnate of these types of regional governments should be to fulfil the strategic goals of the nation, to maintain infrastructure to the required national level, and to push proposals for enhanced services to the federal government for approval, and then be responsible to the implementation of successful proposals.

Many city planning and other duties of the regions should remain the same, with a distinct federal uniform focus. If one region is getting new services, then those services should be permitted to everyone. If one region uses a certain pedestrian walkway size, then that metric should be used by everyone. Building codes, local rules should not be permitted to regionally specific. There are some areas in need of certain local rules. For instance, there are communities of 'victorian homes' that the heritage trust has a vested interest in keeping 'victorian' (their facades are distinctly 19th century and the heritage trust and the community want to keep it that way). In such cases, rules should be determined by the heritage trust and not the regional governments. While that is a positive example of catering for local needs, a local council adjacent to me has implemented a rule that fences should be higher than generally accepted in other council areas. Bins are not permitted to be seen from the street etc. These are examples of useless aesthetic policies based on the personal opinion of some ambitious local zealot. Such policies should not be imposed on communities simply because a local councilman thinks that it should happen (law should have legitimate reason, not be imposed based on personal desire). Pushing all such laws to the federal government (a special division of it may need to be established to service this role) would ensure that only policies that have a legitimate benefit be adopted, and adopted Australia wide.

Integration of laws
Due to the fact that we have permitted the states to self govern for so long, it will take a lot of effort to push their duties to the federal government. While adoption of policies Australia wide or pushing the duties of the state to a federal level are largely semantic,  the trouble we face is in legal integration. At what age can a person get their P plate license? 17 or 18? At what speeds can a p plater travel on 110km/h highways, 80, 90, 100? Each state has various semantic rules. A temporary office of legal integration would need to be established to evaluate competing legislation enacted by various state governments. In the case where the law is not as effective as those established by other states, the most useful law would be adopted. If it turns out the denying p platers to drive at night makes no difference to road tolls (as i have no doubt a proper study would show), then it should be dropped in favour of the other states absence of a curfew. While this seems like a hairy task, an adequate analysis of the justification of competing laws and allowing the adequate analysis to make integration decisions should make the whole process work effectively.
The end result of the integration would be the establishment of national serving laws, uniform across the states.

Result
As you may very well imagine there are many many other factors to consider when changing to this new system. An adequate and lengthy review and planning process would need to be undertaken. The underlying principal remains that all departments with a national interest should be run nationally. In an Australia with no state governments, the divisions (state boundaries) would still exist, but in name only. Any Australian driving from one side of the country to the other would be subject to the same driving laws, same police, same rights and responsibilities for their actions. A child need not enter into a lengthy legal battle when custody of parents are contested across state lines, a child in Alice Springs would have the same rights and privileges as a child in Adelaide or Broome. People fishing on the murry river need not worry about how to alter their fishing behavior, based on which side of the river they are currently standing on.

Australia needs a uniform legislative framework to ensure that we conform to quintessential Australian concept of a "fair go", rather than a go in one state and another on another state.

This is a massive abstraction of a very complex process. I am interested in hearing your comments and criticisms. Post them in the comments section of you have any such comments.