If the Commonwealth Government were able to override state powers, it would mean the federal structure was wasting millions of dollars on a series of State governments which are incapable of doing anything. This is not the way to a stable nation. This is not the way to a safe democracy. This is not the way Australia should head.

Already, the Commonwealth Government can interfere with the formally independent state governments by making tied grants. The State Governments are significantly weakened by the Commonwealth Government's near monopoly on meaningful taxation. This limits the State governments' abilities to govern for their own people, and is an unnecessary limitation to our democratic and natural right to be ourselves.

Already, the Commonwealth Government can interfere with the formally independent state governments by signing international agreements that encroach on their territory, without first consulting them. This defeats the entire point of federalism from a perspective of democracy's best interest, because if the Commonwealth Government can do what it wishes, there is only limited power struggles to cause compromise and limit power.

Centralising power increases the risk of failure in that central area. This failure can take many guises, from corrupt government officials to terrorists, from a misled and poor choice in an election to natural disaster. Surely in this age when we are so concerned about terrorism we should be decentralising our government, if anything.

Time has shown, again and again, that separated societies will separate. There's a few thousand kilometres and a different history separating Melbourne and Sydney. Commonwealth domination means Sydney domination (smallstaters would probably add Melbourne to that). It limits other states' abilities to express themselves, in their own meaningful ways, by altering their societies, and to become unique people. This is a slow and usually subconcious process, but in the space of fifty years, Australia and New Zealand have grown from being British to being Australians and New Zealanders, who have forgotten that they ever considered themselves British. Indeed, Victorian and New Zealand accents began diverging probably around the same time (beginning in the 1960s and 1970s) from the almost common, inherited base. These two areas commonly but uniquely show a merger of vowels which causes 'celery' and 'salary'; 'shell' and 'shall' to be homophones. New Zealand English, untethered by our centralised government, has obviously been free to develop further; and their distinct political climates has allowed their unique identity to become all the stronger. A strong central government and nationally consistent culture will feel increasingly uncomfortable, and is dangerous to the benefits centralising some powers offers.

I do not understand arguments for centralising government. I have heard it claimed, most mysteriously, that Australia is too small a country for a federal government. Canada manages to maintain a decentralising federal structure with a mere ten million more people than Australia. Switzerland also has a federal structure that no-one debates with only seven million people!

The only other argument I'm familiar with is that to combat terrorism, the government needs all the power it can get. This would be laughable if not intended seriously; aside from the aforementioned difficulties with single points of failure, I thought Nineteen Eighty-Four provided apt rebuttal to that suggestion in more general terms.