Associate Professor John Rice argues in The Conversation (5 June 2014) that the recent federal budget left the states in the invidious position of having to argue for an increase to the GST to fund basic education, health and policing. The Australian Federation is broken, he writes, and it has been broken for a long time. ‘The most sensible answer is to start again, by abolishing the states entirely. The states … are colonial relics, parochial lines on a map that have little social or economic relevance today. Developed at a time before telecommunications and decent transportation, today they could not be more anachronistic.’
John Rice is an Associate Professor at the Griffith Business School. His doctoral research examined strategic alliances in mobile telecommunications. He has other postgraduate degrees in economics, business administration, finance and education.