Ideas@TheCentre
Why can't federal politicians stick to federal issues?
It was a major player in national politics who once observed 'All politics is local.' That was Tip O'Neill, a former Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
The federal election campaign suggests that Australia's federal politicians have taken O'Neill's words to heart. Never before has a supposedly national campaign paid so much attention to local issues in selected marginal seats. At times, Gillard and Abbott have appeared to be running for Mayor of Townsville or Premier of Queensland rather than Prime Minister of Australia. Both major parties have showered key marginal seats with promises of sports facilities, by-pass roads, and new urban rail connections.
There is nothing wrong with this if you dismiss federalism as an anachronism and favour One Big Government for Australia. You may even admire the pinpoint targeting of marginal seats as clever campaigning. But to those who value federalism and checks and balances on big government, the narrowing focus of national campaigns is a worry.
One concern is that it reinforces the bias towards increased government spending rather than reduced taxation as the route to political power. A national government cannot favour a marginal seat with a tax cut, but it can do so with a selected spending promise. All the promises in this campaign are for increased spending, except for a puny cut in company income tax. Even that cut is offset by the opposition's parental leave 'levy' and the government's new mining tax.
The other big problem is that sports facilities, by-pass roads, and urban public transport should not be the business of the national government in a federal system. The more the national government spreads its tentacles into local affairs, the more federalism becomes lost in a maze of blurred accountability and blame-shifting.
When Tip O'Neill said that all politics is local, he didn’t mean that all policy is local. Our federal politicians should be attentive to their local constituents’ concerns but should stick to policies that are properly in the domain of the federal government.
Robert Carling is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
