I was thinking about blame a while back when reading one of my fellow Speccie writers talk about the sorry economic state of affairs in Tasmania and how Tasmanians are over $20,000 poorer (gross state product per capita) than Australians as a whole (gross domestic product per capita). But life is complicated and certainly Australia’s totally broken version of federalism is too. You see, I’m not sure we can really blame Tasmania for its lacklustre economic performance. Why? Well, go back to the late-1970s and early-1980s. Tasmania wanted to build a huge hydro-electric dam that would give it cheap electricity. On any reading of our American, Madisonian-inspired constitution that paid even the tiniest bit of attention to what the people who wrote and ratified it intended – in other words to those with the legitimate authority to make the law – the power to do this fell clearly within state jurisdiction. But, you know, a lot of inner-city Melbourne and Sydney types didn’t like the idea of flooding this beautiful bit of Tasmanian countryside. Of course in law one’s druthers are not the test. Well, perhaps when it comes to Australia’s broken version of federalism they are the test because in 1983 in the Tasmanian Dam case the High Court of Australia held for the Commonwealth. Tasmania was blocked from building the dam.  And the top judges did so largely on the basis of the external affairs power. As a native-born Canadian who did his first law degree in a country with a still-functioning version of federalism I was stunned when I first read the case years ago. Remember, in law the question as a judge is not ‘Do I like what they are doing?’ Nor is it, ‘Does it mesh with my first-order preferences?’ No, the test is to try to find an honest interpretation of the legal text, which given that only purposive humans can convey meaning amounts to seeking what the real-life lawmakers intended in the document they drafted that divided up powers between the centre and the states. Instead, Australians were handed down one of the most laughable top court decisions in a federalism dispute that’s ever been passed down in any federalist democracy ever. Well, at least until the High Court finished the job, and killed off any remaining remnants of federalism in this country, in the Work Choices case. (And full disclosure, I railed against that decision at the time. You know something is up when Ian Callinan and Michael Kirby both dissent together.) This was one of John Howard’s worst mistakes because it should have been plain that if you ask the top court to centralise labour relations – on even more implausible grounds than with the Tasmanian Dam case – and it does, then once Labor gets back into office nationally it will use that power. And boy has Labor ever done so. Our labour relations were far, far more liberal and friendly to small-government types like me back before the Work Choices Howard legislation when these calls rested with the states.  So one can like the substance of Howard’s Work Choices reforms but still think pushing for them a bad, no terrible, mistake when it requires ruining our federal system and asking the top judges to contort themselves in Cirque de Soleil knots to deliver implausibility on implausibility.

My larger point is that it was never Tasmania’s fault that the inner-city types in Melbourne and Sydney handcuffed them from being able to build a cheap and (in today’s net zero world) incredibly green, low-carbon electricity supply. Tasmania would today have Australia’s cheapest electricity by a few solar systems which would be doing wonders for the place. Nor was it Tasmania’s fault when the inner-city Sydney and Melbourne types later on imposed Commonwealth preferences when it came to logging and milling wood. So I, for one, would be very hesitant in blaming Tasmania for their relatively poor economic performance. They are what the lefty, doctors’ wives types in our two biggest cities made them. A properly functioning federalist system, with top judges who had something other than the worst record in the federalist world in upholding the intended division of powers, would have prevented this. So blame can be tricky.

The same goes for Gen Z, the young ones born between the late-1990s and about 2012. It’s not their fault that they have gone through school when Australia’s educational performance has been the worst in the country’s history. These young ones didn’t design and implement a system that delivers worse educational outputs and results than Kazakhstan’s. No, that was us oldies. And they weren’t the ones who oversaw the lunatic response of governments to Covid that transferred more wealth, and by far, from poor to rich and from young to old – via printing money and asset inflation – than at any time in the country’s history. No, that was the fault of Team Morrison and all the sheep-like, unquestioning oldies who allowed themselves to be scared literally witless by governmental fear-mongering. Nor is it, because of world’s highest per capita immigration programs, Gen Z’s fault that housing costs in terms of multiples of the average wage are far, far higher for them than it was for us oldies. Look, drawing out $20,000 early from your super is not going to fix this.  No, this too was the fault us oldies and the worst political class ever whom we oldies – not the young ones – elected. So I am leery of blaming them for flirting with stupid neo-Marxist idiocies and downright evil anti-Israeli attitudes. Again, they didn’t do any of that to themselves. We were the ones who delivered a country where patriotism is a near-dead virtue and where the fact – and fact it is – that Australia has one of the greatest histories of which to be proud on earth delivering one of the best places to live (especially for women and minorities) is not only not taught, and not emphasised, it is flat out denied, rejected and pilloried.

Let me return tangentially to my first topic of federalism, before closing. I wrote about it here this week because it was a topic very close to the heart of John Stone who died (not ‘passed’, a mindless euphemism that John would have hated, but ‘died’) a fortnight ago. John was a great federalist who, unusually here in Australia, understood the virtues of a properly functioning federal system – because when you look around today’s democratic world the federal systems are richer, have fewer civil servants per capita, deliver more citizens’ substantive preferences through delegation down and do all that through competition (never co-operation) than any unitary set-up. Indeed, John founded the Samuel Griffith Society (‘SGS’) especially on that point of trying to buttress federalism. Having attended many SGS annual conferences with him over the years I am confident he would have agreed with all that I wrote above about federalism. He might have been more biting even than I was above. But he would have agreed. So consider this column, with the double entendre title, to be a tiny tribute to a great Australian.