PolitiBites

The Federal Government has made firm moves to switch from a "Damage Control" to an "In Control" mode of politics this week, using a quick succession of long-anticipated policy announcements to force the continued scrutiny of Peter Garret and Kevin Rudd's recent self-amelioration out of the media cycle.

First, on Monday, The Prime Minister and Minister for Education teamed up at the Amaroo School in Canberra to participate in some obligatory art and craft activities, and to officially launch their plans for a new National Curriculum. The PM then addressed the National Press Club in Canberra earlier today, unveiling the Government's blueprint for a National Health and Hospitals Network (NHHN) and a new system of Canberra-dominated health funding.

As has already been suggested by several commentators in the media, Rudd's Beattie-esque combination of "Apology" and "Action" is certainly a politically calculated move: firstly lowering public expectations about the government's capabilities, then exceeding those expectations with the immediate announcement of new policy initiatives. Both announcements seem to have been a great success for the Government thus far, diverting public attention away from the Government's current vulnerabilities and temporarily shutting an increasingly-successful Opposition Leader out of the public debate. They have also created the clever illusion of "decisive Government action" by simply making an announcement, avoiding the need to actually tackle any difficult political decisions.

While both of these proposals appear to have been an effective political cure for Government's recent problems however, they also present one of the most significant changes to the longstanding arrangements of Australian Health and Education policy ever proposed. Certainly the aggregation of decision-making in both policy areas to a single level of government will help to address the public's long-standing dissatisfaction with the "blame game" between Canberra and the States (in the short term at least). Worryingly however, the key element of "centralisation" that lies at the heart of both the National Curriculum and Health & Hospitals Network proposals may lead to the creation of far more significant policy challenges for the Government in the long term. In both cases, the monopolisation of bureaucratic decisions in Canberra and increased separation of these decisions from local service providers will inevitably have a negative impact on accountability, and is unlikely to deliver vital flexibility or policy innovation that is required in both fields.

In the case of the National Curriculum, critics have been quick to highlight the potential flaws presented in the centralisation and monopolisation of education policy in Canberra. A key point in Julia Gillard's defence of the new national approach was that a uniform curriculum would deliver much-needed consistency for families who move interstate midway through their child's education. As highlighted by John Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs however, the number of people to whom these benefits apply is a distinct minority of the total school population. These minority-benefits could potentially be far outweighed by the problems of "rigidity" inherent in the new national system, which in its nature as a universal learning blueprint, will be very hard to adapt to the specific and diverse needs of students across Australia.

The elimination of the eight existing state curricula could also have a stifling effect on innovation within the education system, in that there is no capacity within a single national curricula to compare and contrast different approaches, learning from the mistakes or triumphs of each. Again, although the system offers some improvements in accountability by concentrating responsibility for decisions to a single source, this concentration also places decision makers at a far greater distance from students, parents and educators, limiting their opportunities to offer meaningful feedback or criticism on the new system.

The Government's new approach to Health is certainly not as blatantly centralised as the new National Curriculum, and in fact proposes a great deal of devolution of Hospital funding administration from a State to a regional and local level. These proposed changes certainly offer a great deal more flexibility than is currently offered and the country's intensely bureaucratic state systems, but are still fundamentally undermined by the floors of Centralisation outlined in the case of the National Curriculum.

This inherent inflexibility has already been evidenced in the early criticism of the initial NHHN report, with Ian Hickey describing the new approach on the 7:30 Report this evening as "rigidly Hospital-centric". Hickey argues that effective exclusion of non-hospital and secondary health services from the planning guidelines for the new "local health networks" could potentially lead to furtherunnecessary hospitalisation, cost-shifting between the network and non-network services and ultimately prevent local networks from addressing their area's health demands in the most effective manner.

Despite these potential problems relating to centralisation, both policies (in particular the new Health Plan) include some very positive and well-designed attempts to address the most dire policy problems facing these fields. Before any of this can be properly considered however, the Government must first face the more immediate and certainly more Herculean challenge of convincing the six Australian States to sign up. Even in the most friendly of COAG meetings, asking the States to voluntarily hand over two of their largest policy responsibilities, as well as a large slab of their GST revenue, is unlikely to be well received. While Rudd has already threatened a Referendum on the issue if the States fail to fall in line, the abysmal success-rate of past referenda in Australia will certainly make this threat an ineffective deterrent. As the jostling between the capitals plays out, the "blame game" is almost certainly set to restart itself in spectacular fashion, with the Federal Government likely to emerge from the fray with either red faces, or very empty pockets.