Ronald Reagan once joked that the nine most dangerous words in the English language were, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ Funny. Amusing. Very American. But in Australia we have refined the warning label. Our most dangerous word is not ‘government’. It is ‘National’. Whenever that word tumbles out of Canberra, Australians should prepare like a coastal town hearing a cyclone warning. Windows boarded. Pets secured. Wallets hidden. Something expensive, sprawling, and indestructible is about to make landfall. The sirens are always loud. The clean-up always runs longer than promised and the costs more than quoted.
In theory, ‘national’ signals ambition. Unity. A bold federated vision stretching from Brisbane to Broome. In practice, it means the Commonwealth has decided to centralise a problem it does not fully understand, fund it with borrowed money it does not really have, and manage it through a thicket of bureaucrats, committees, consultants and accountability structures designed to ensure that no one is ever responsible when it all goes wrong. ‘National’ is the political equivalent of a shark fin. You cannot see the whole thing yet, but you know it is going to bite.
Consider National Cabinet. It was supposed to be a triumph of cooperative Commonwealth-state relations. Instead, it became a masterclass in governing by press conference: secret meetings, shifting rules and accountability so diffuse it could qualify as a gas. ‘National’ here did not mean unified. It meant unaccountable.
Take the National Broadband Network. Sold as nation-building infrastructure, it became a rolling demonstration of how technological utopianism curdles into bureaucratic sludge. Billions spent. Timelines blown out. Technologies chosen, abandoned, resurrected and quietly buried again. Australians were promised fast, cheap, reliable connectivity, instead received a national monument to sunk costs, mixed metaphors and ongoing losses funded by taxpayers. Having spent decades and tens of billions constructing a compromise nobody wanted, in 2025, government committed another three billion dollars to upgrade the premises still stranded on the old network.
Then there is the National Disability Insurance Scheme. A noble idea, unquestionably, but noble ideas do not repeal arithmetic. The NDIS cost forty-four billion dollars in 2023-24 and is projected to exceed sixty billion by 2028. This, even if the target of eight-per-cent annual growth is met. In 2024 it ranked as the third-largest expense program in the entire federal budget, behind only the aged pension and GST distributions to the states. Every review promises sustainability. Every year the price tag rises. The scheme now covers more than 760,000 participants, nearly double the 410,000 originally projected by the Productivity Commission.
The National Reconstruction Fund sounded like post-war cosplay for people who have never built anything. Hard hats. Steel. Productivity. What arrived instead was a glossy brochure, vague criteria and a consultancy invoice. Billions allocated, outcomes perpetually under development. Reconstruction of what exactly? Manufacturing? The economy? Political narratives? The only thing reliably reconstructed is Canberra’s habit of mistaking politicised capital allocation for industrial strategy.
Housing did not escape the treatment. The National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation promised to make homes more affordable by inserting another layer of federal finance bureaucracy between the problem and anyone capable of solving it. Because when something is scarce and expensive, the obvious solution is a new government agency. Houses did not get cheaper. Reports certainly got longer.
Energy policy, already Australia’s most reliable source of trench warfare, gained its own talisman: the National Energy Transition Authority. A name so grand it practically demands a ribbon-cutting ceremony. With regulators, market operators, subsidy factories and ministers already issuing duelling press releases, what Australia clearly needed was one more coordinating body.
Education followed the same pattern. The National Curriculum flattened state systems into a single ideological template, replacing pluralism with prescription. In the name of national consistency, mandatory cross-curriculum priorities were embedded across every subject, including mathematics, where cultural framing now sits alongside multiplication tables. The curriculum no longer asks what knowledge students need to master but what values they should absorb. Content has been crowded out by themes, rigour by relevance, and depth by declaration.
This shift did not arise from evidence of pedagogical failure in the states but from a desire to use schooling as a vehicle for social and political instruction and indoctrination. Meanwhile literacy and numeracy results stagnate and international rankings slip. The response was not to narrow the focus but to add more guidance, more perspectives, and more administrative scaffolding.
Transport? Enter the National Intermodal Corporation. Ports, rail, logistics: real problems crying out for local coordination and commercial discipline. Instead, they were nationalised into abstraction. Projects announced. Plans revised. Shovels mostly imaginary. Intermodal came to mean interminable. The proposed Sydney-Newcastle fast train, if it ever gets on the tracks, will absorb hundreds of billions of dollars and may end up like the Californian fast train – never to run.
And there, embedded in every example, is the pattern. ‘National’ becomes an excuse for scale without discipline and spending without ownership. If it is national, it is everyone’s problem, which in Canberra translates neatly into no one’s fault.
All the while, ‘national’ crowds out alternatives. Local solutions? Too parochial. Markets? Too messy. Private capital? Ideologically suspect. Incremental reform? Not media-friendly. There is also an enduring moral hazard. Once something is branded ‘national’, the program becomes politically untouchable. Costs are waved through in the name of unity. Failures are rebranded as teething problems. Blow-outs become proof of commitment. The word itself shields programs from scrutiny while the bill is quietly handed to future taxpayers.
Only a national central plan will do, preferably designed by a distant bureaucracy disconnected not only from taxpayers but also reality, announced with a flourish, an overpaid management team and board, and a ten-year horizon safely beyond the next two elections.
Australia’s most effective policies have usually been specific, constrained and boring. The disasters arrive fully branded, media-trained and wrapped in the flag by a politician insisting you should feel grateful.
So the next time a shiny new initiative with ‘National’ in the title is unveiled, do not applaud. Check your pockets. Watch the horizon.
In Australia, ‘National’ is not a promise. It is a warning.
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