One aspect of the govenment’s spending spree that has attracted relatively little attention is its implications for Federal-State relations. In important respects, these policies are more centralist than anything seen since the Whitlam era. Throughout the health and education sectors in particular, Howard is seeking to get involved in policy areas that have previously been left to the state, and to do so with direct day-to-day control.

But whereas Whitlam was a consistent centralist, these policies are a logical mess. The general line is that the states should be kept on a tight financial leash, but not relieved of any of their basic responsibilities for schools, hospitals, the TAFE sector and so on. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth will provide lavishly funded frills for schools with a “made in Canberra” label, operate a parallel line of Rolls-Royce TAFEs and pick and choose priorities in the health sector.

As I’ve argued before, it would be a good thing for the Commonwealth to take over hospitals, and probably also the TAFE sector. But that means accepting full responsibility for the sector, not throwing a few billion at whatever came up last in the focus groups, while expecting the states to do all the thankless basics. And it should be matched with a complete withdrawal from other areas (school education and highways are obvious candidates).

Here’s a piece I did on the government’s economic record, first published at New Matilda
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As predicted, the Liberals have given preferences to the Greens ahead of Labor, raising the prospect that the Greens might win some urban seats and perhaps hold the balance of power in a hung Parliament. As I’ve observed previously, the Greens have been subject to ferocious attacks, in the course of which they’ve been compared to Communists, Nazis, kooks and vandals. Presumably, a party that would give preferences to Communists or Nazis ought not to be supported by decent Australians.

So will any of those who have denounced the Greens in these terms follow through and advocate a vote against their Liberal allies? Will any of them even condemn the government? I’m not holding my breath.

Paul Krugman, observing Bush’s deficit policy made the observation that the traditional Republican critique of the Keynesian case for using deficits to stimulate the economy (that, once you started running deficits, you’d never find a suitable time to stop) was true, but only as regards Republicans.

Similarly, having been announced his conversion to the cause of social democracy a few days ago, Howard is behaving like an economic rationalist’s caricature of a social democrat, spraying billions of dollars around in a combination of interest-group pork-barrelling and half-baked ideas for micromanagement of everything from the TAFE sector to the taxi industry. Meanwhile, the decision to make the states pay for the National Water Initiative means that basic needs for schools and hospitals will be worse-funded than before. Again, more detail from Chris Sheil

Labor’s correct response here, I would say is not to engage in an item-by-item bidding war, but to announce one big intervention in Medicare, using part of the money already spent by Howard.

Update Monday AM The “drunken sailor” description is irresistibly apt. Crikey used it to, and here’s the Oz editorial

Today’s SMH runs a front-page headline on what must be the most blatant MRD item since Richard Nixon said much the same thing about himself. Chris Sheil has more.

Labor’s long-awaited tax policy has been released, and a quick look suggests there’s not much to get excited about. Labor has taken on both stages of Howard’s budget tax cuts and added a bit more for nearly everyone, but not a lot for anyone.

The most interesting thing in the package is the reform to family tax benefit. I’m not an expert on the complexities, but Labor appears to have achieved a useful simplification and expansion without spending a heap of money.

The other point that may arouse some interest is that the funding calculations include offsets from assumed behavioral response – more spouses going back to work. As the package points out, the precedent for this kind of thing was set by ANTS. Still this will heighten the intensity of the dispute over whether the package should be submitted for costing by Finance under the (ludicrously misnamed) Charter of Budget Honesty. My advice would be to refuse.

Apart from this funding, relies on two more changes to superannuation to add to all the others we have experienced. First, temporary entrants to Australia will no longer get the benefit of the Superannuation Guarantee Charge – this will go to the government instead. Since other countries do the same and those affected are, by definition, not voters, this looks like a sharp political move. The other is to abolish the superannuation co-contribution recently introduced by Howard.

It’s disappointing to see no assault on avoidance through trusts and private companies, nothing on capital gains or fringe benefits, and nothing much on compliance. However, given that the approach seems to be to produce each policy item with an associated set of funding proposals, perhaps there is still something to come.

With luck, this will neutralise tax as an election issue, but Labor needs to come up with something more impressive than it has produced so far in its core policy areas of health and education.

We’ve heard a lot from the conservative side of politics lately about how the Greens are kooks, Communists, Nazis, anarcho-syndicalists and so on (I’m quoting senior politicians and prominent columnists here, not RWDB bloggers).

So how is that a Liberal minority government in Tasmania managed to last two years relying on Green support? It wasn’t comfortable – minority governments rarely are – and the Liberals cut a deal with Labor to make sure it wouldn’t happen again. But if even half of what has been said in the last couple of weeks was true, a government relying on Green support wouldn’t last two weeks before it fell to pieces over some demand for compulsory vegetarianism or the like.

There was also a Labor-Green Accord government a few years before. This also failed, but over the traditional Green issue of forests, rather than any of the nonsense we have heard about lately.

There’s a chronology here from Bob Brown focusing on forest issues. Obviously, it’s not an unbiased viewpoints, but the basic facts about the governments and their duration are there.