Australia is one of the richest countries in the world. Our governments act as if we are poor |
Australia's health system is in crisis and while the tensions over funding between state and territory leaders and the Commonwealth is at an all-time high.
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People desperately waiting for medical help need real action, not performative posturing.
The current standoff between the Commonwealth and the states over hospital funding has been framed as a failure of negotiation but the root cause is a failure of imagination.
Australia's health system is being squeezed by a shortage of funds, and it won't be fixed until we talk about how and where to raise more money
Put simply, our Chief Minister and his counterparts need to rethink the foundations of Commonwealth and state financial relations, not squabble over decimal places.
The reason the state of our hospitals, schools and other essential services are getting worse is that, while Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, our governments act as if we are poor.
Forget all the nonsense about Australia being a high-tax country. If we were to collect just the average amount of tax collected by OECD countries, we could spend an extra $100 billion per year on services.
Most of our financial woes can be traced back to the Howard government. Back in 1999 John Howard and Peter Costello relied on state and territory leaders to persuade the public that their GST was a good idea. But back then Howard and Costello promised the public, and the premiers, that the GST would be a "growth tax" that would provide a reliable and growing revenue base.
But that wasn't true.
In reality, GST revenue has grown more slowly........