Not-so-great Expectations
Posted by Jacques Chester on Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Ostensibly, Rudd’s reform package is about centralising funding and decentralising control. It may be that Rudd is drinking his own koolaid on this one. Previously I thought it was a package set up from the start in order to provide either to kill the Insulation Ignition Program or to provide a useful glittery centrepiece for the next election campaign when the premiers shot it down.
But no: he apparently wanted it to succeed this round. So a few billion dollars were promised to the premiers, and all of them accepted — except WA, possibly because they realise that they’ll be propping up the disasters in NSW, SA and the unavoidably expensive NT system.
But if Rudd believes that control will remain decentralised, he’s kidding himself. He’s forgotten the golden rule of politics: who has the gold, makes the rules. An even cursory examination of the management of higher education would make this clear. The passage of time has seen successive federal departments impose ever-more onerous regulation and stricture upon the universities. These self-governing institutions have been reduced to rather unflattering supplications in order to obtain their money-fix.
And so it will be with hospitals. Rudd has recreated everything bad about the federal higher education system: from the centralisation of power through money right down to centrally-planned price fixing.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 6:20 PM and filed under Economics and public policy, Health, Politics - national.
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From what I’ve seen, I couldn’t agree more, except that I think it will be worse than the higher ed. system, because there will in fact still be two masters (state + federal) and not just one — at least with higher ed., there’s no deflecting who’s to blame for the current mess — with two masters, all problems are inevitably caused by the other master. In addition, as far as I can tell, apart from moving money in yet more circles, there isn’t the slightest thing about how the movement of that money might actually make the system better or more efficient.
Posted on 20-Apr-10 at 6:35 pm | Permalinkconrad: Well, they’re going to make everyone use the Victorian model which is supposedly the best in Australia. Of course, forcing everywhere to be the same means there’s no place for innovation to come from.
The core problem is constitutional – the states have most of the responsibilities, the commonwealth has most of the taxing power.
Posted on 20-Apr-10 at 7:01 pm | PermalinkHumbug. You could say that about every level of administration in health (or any other system), right on down to the wards and the individuals on shift at the moment you are reading this comment.
There is no reason a centralised system can’t be structured to encourage and embrace innovation in its parts. If it fails to do so, that is a failure of the particular system’s design, not of the very idea of centralisation.
So, if what you’re saying is that this particular system, as proposed, has no structures for encouraging innovation, you need to make that argument more fully.
Posted on 22-Apr-10 at 8:41 pm | Permalink