State governments are a terrible waste of money, considering how the same bureaucracy is repeated in every state and territory. There is no good reason why every state needs to have it's own bureaucrats making policies for education, health, police, infrastructure etc. This system results in the country's best policymaker influencing one state, and other more mediocre people making policies in all the other states. If all the state governments' departments were closed down and everything was managed at the federal level, there would be more money available to hire better quality policymakers rather than a large number of average ones.
The needs of each state are not that different to justify separate departments. Sure the states have different climates, a slightly different mix of races, and one or two words in their vocabularies that other states don't quite get, but there is no reason to have and entirely separate hierarchy managing the government services.
Centralising government services would allow greater specialisation of the policymakers. Take for example one state the gets a lot of tropical rain (I'm looking at you Queensland!). With state based departments, that state's infrastructure people would be experts in planning anti-flooding projects. And all the other states wouldn't benefit from this expertise. With centralised infrastructure function, the anti-flooding experts could apply their expertise to the whole country.
State and federal politicians spend a substantial amount of their time trying to shift blame to the other level, or screw the other level over. If it were all managed at a federal level then there would be no opportunity for this political time wasting and ass covering. There would be one department, run by one or more ministers from the same government. The buck would stop there and only there.
Obviously we still need states as a geographical division, for the purpose of inter-state sport competitions etc, and they may be a logical way to manage some government services. Just as a large company may have a manager for each state, but still be centrally controlled.
It's not just bureaucrats that demonstrate the inefficiencies of state governments. There's also the problem that each state has subtle differences in their laws and regulations, which means a business operating in one state has to do a whole lot of compliance work to see how the different regulations in the new state might impact them. The inconsistent laws also impact drivers who have to face subtly different road laws when driving interstate. The state roads departments have done a fairly good job of making the laws consistent across states - but that just goes to demonstrate my point - there are departments working in each state, ALL DOING THE SAME THING.
I would like to see all responsibilities of the state governments gradually transitioned to the federal government over say 20 years, until state governments fade into history. Let's get our politicians working for some serious positive change in our country.
