Malcolm Turnbull has ensured that the crucial restoration of the health of the Australian federation has been delayed for years, if not decades.

The benefit of such a restoration is reliably projected as substantial – 10 per cent of GDP. That would be over $150 billion a year in today’s money, and around $8,000 for every man, woman and child.

That’s the advice the premiers received in 2007 when, in an honest moment, they commissioned an expert report through their newly established Council for the Australian Federation. Professor Anne Twomey and Professor Glenn Withers strongly recommended the country go back to ‘best practice federalism’, as in Switzerland and comparable federations and envisaged in our constitution. But when the premiers realised this would mean they’d have to work as honest premiers once did – being accountable to their electors, justifying why they are taxing them so much − they dropped the report like a hot potato. They even put the Council into suspended animation.

Turnbull made it easier for the premiers to evade their responsibility by announcing his proposal from the carpark of the Penrith Panthers, with no projections and no discussion paper. He neither coordinated his lines with his Treasurer nor assured any state levying a tax that it would not be punished under the Grants Commission’s socialist ‘equalisation’ regime. Expecting the premiers to agree was, at best, naive. It was no different from expecting the army of healthy welfare dependents to give up their leisure to help our farmers bring in the harvest just because that is the right thing to do.

Instead, repeating the blatant lie that Abbott had stripped them of $80 billion, most of the premiers hid behind the argument that the voters would never stand for what is normal in a federation − different tax rates in different states. They claimed as untruthfully as Neville Wran once did that this would lead to ‘double taxation’. A ‘senior NSW government source’ even spun the desperate line to the Telegraph’s Andrew Clenell that the ‘punters’ (that’s the disparaging term some politicians use to refer to their constituents) wouldn’t ‘wear it’.

The premiers have blatantly rejected what is fundamental to any true federation. As the American founding father Alexander Hamilton put it, a state must possess an ‘independent and uncontrollable authority’ to raise their own revenues.

The states have, as Alfred Deakin warned, bound themselves to Canberra’s ‘chariot wheels’; the weakest states in any comparable federation in the world, no longer sovereign but mere satrapies of the imperial centre. Turnbull followed the premiers’ petulant rejection of his latest captain’s pick with an immediate, abject surrender. Nevertheless, most media criticism was muted, unlike the hysterical over-reaction to that innocuous knighthood. Yet federalism is central to the Australian project. Cognisant of Montesquieu’s warning that, whether disguised or not, a republic with a vast territory could not survive, the American solution of a federation of sovereign states was the very one carefully and deliberately adopted by our founders. Without this, there would have been not one but several nations on our continent. But few in the political and media establishment today seem to have more than a superficial knowledge and appreciation of the contribution and the practical relevance today of the work of the American founding fathers on federalism, particularly in The Federalist Papers. Fewer still are adherents of basic federalist principles. (They’re easily identifiable – most would gravitate to the Samuel Griffith Society.)

It is hardly surprising then that while school students are indoctrinated with neo-Marxist gender fluidity, they have no more than a vague understanding of one of the fundamental pillars of our Commonwealth. This is that Australians, ‘humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown… and under the Constitution…’. Australians have since agreed to allow Canberra to share just two additional powers with the states, social services and indigenous affairs. Nevertheless, High Court justices have vastly increased Canberra’s powers. Worse, they’ve added insult to injury by declaring that they will ignore the people’s wishes as expressed in any relevant referendum.

The result is a national disaster. The worst example of a power into which the Commonwealth has intruded, against the constitutional intention, must be education. Since then, the cost has climbed spectacularly, just as standards of numeracy and literacy and the knowledge of history have collapsed to appalling levels never before known and which are now drawing unfavourable international comment. In the meantime, the Canberra politicians are not spending enough time and attention on their core functions. Just take the run-down in defence and control of the national borders under the Rudd and Gillard governments. Associated with this is the multibillion dollar scandal concerning the acquisition of the present submarine fleet. Or take the discriminatory tax on backpackers working on farms and in the tourist industry made necessary because healthy young Australians on welfare enjoy the option of refusing such arduous work. The tax, to come into force soon, is unlikely to produce any significant return. Unbeknown to our government, backpackers are mobile and will instead go to countries with more sensible politicians. And the harvest?

Meanwhile, the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, unrestrained by government, threatens to bankrupt up to 80 per cent of the nation’s 35,000 truck drivers who run their own business. Then there’s the ruination of the nation’s greatest food bowl, the Murray Darling, under the water plan introduced by Malcolm Turnbull. And while so many in the media rejoiced in the show trial of Cardinal Pell− the first prelate to adopt powerful and convincing measures against paedophilia − the nationwide crime wave involving the abuse of indigenous children remains unchecked. Warren Mundine laments that this means that no one, not even indigenous adults, think indigenous children are important. Nor apparently do the federal politicians.

It’s time the politicians recognised that they operate under a federal constitution, not a ramshackle empire based on Canberra draining the country of resources and providing not just mediocre but bad government.