Call for new conventions to redraft the Constitution

Constitutional scholar Greg Craven is calling for a new round of constitutional conventions to redefine the federal system. Noting that “[t]he word is that the Commission of Audit will recommend serious restitution of powers over school education and much of health to the states”, he suggests looking to history for a practical way forward: “Oddly, there is a pretty clear solution to this particularly murky problem. We have been down this road before, over a century ago. When Australia wanted to go from six bickering colonies to one continental nation, we faced all these issues and more. The process we used was a constitutional convention where our best and brightest — and most bearded — thrashed the issues out. … It worked last time.”