I Bet There Is Some Government Scrambling To Fix This Total Mess. Just Amazing!

Earlier this week we had a case resolved in the High Court that suggested that the way School Chaplaincy was funded by the Commonwealth was invalid / illegal.

You can read all about the decision and what it means here:

The introduction says it all:

Commonwealth left scrambling by school chaplaincy decision

Posted on June 19, 2014 by a1068313

In this post Adelaide Law School’s Gabrielle Appleby explains the High Court’s decision in Williams v Commonwealth [2014] HCA 23 (19 June 2014) and the need for an immediate response from the Commonwealth. This article was originally published on The Conversation.

The High Court has again put the future of the federal government’s school chaplaincy program in jeopardy, confirming its 2012 decision that the Commonwealth’s spending programs must be supported by valid federal legislation.

In a case brought again by Toowoomba man Ron Williams, the High Court insisted federal spending programs respect the constitutional division of powers between the Commonwealth and the states.

The full article is here:

http://theconversation.com/commonwealth-left-scrambling-by-school-chaplaincy-decision-27935

or here:

http://blogs.adelaide.edu.au/public-law-rc/2014/06/19/commonwealth-left-scrambling-by-school-chaplaincy-decision/

This did not seem to be all that relevant to e-Health until I had an email from a very thorough reader who had read further.

He noticed that the fix put in place by the previous government a few years ago had a schedule attached that listed all sorts of Government spending that an urgent Act of Parliament was intended to validate which now seem to be invalid again.

Again from the Conversation here is the situation.

“The government’s initial response
In response to the 2012 Williams decision, the then-Gillard government introduced Section 32B into the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997. This section gave the Commonwealth the power to vary or administer funding arrangements and grants that were specified in the regulations.

The parliament also inserted a schedule into the Financial Management and Accountability Regulations 1997 that listed over 400 funding programs, including the National School Chaplaincy and Student Welfare Program. Future programs could be inserted into the schedule by the government itself through amending regulations.

The primary constitutional difficulty with the remedial legislation was that many of the programs authorised in the regulations had little, or dubious, connections to federal legislative power, including a number of grants to schools, higher education and research institutions, local government and, of course, the chaplaincy program itself.”

My reader had downloaded and looked at the schedule and guess what? It looks like Medicare Locals, some telehealth and Commonwealth funding of e-Health implementation are not presently validly funded!

Don't be confused - this funding is the 'guts' of the total funding for e-health initiatives.

Search for medicare or eHealth in the .pdf to find the references.

Oh dear oh dear. Does this mean that we as citizens can have our money back?

What a fiasco!

David.