The federal intervention deserves close study, beyond mere rehearsal of any opinion on whether pill testing at concerts is a good or bad thing. That's because it is proving yet another trapdoor in ACT self-government by which the Commonwealth can, if it wants, try to negate the decisions of ACT politicians, in a manner it could not do if the ACT were a state.

The Commonwealth has ample power to frustrate the ACT if it wants. Usually, however, it must do so openly and in its Parliament, as it did when it voted to forbid the ACT (and the Northern Territory) from having a euthanasia law, or when it effectively trampled over ACT attempts to anticipate gay marriage. Indeed, perhaps Scott Morrison, who (along with many of his cabinet) campaigned against same-sex marriage, might contemplate, for symbolic purposes, directing the NCA to forbid any such marriages on national land in the ACT.

It goes without saying that taking a stand on pill testing is mere moral grandstanding, providing the government with the twin bonus of showing its resolute law-and-order credentials and chastising the trendy ACT for being progressive. This sort of thing, it imagines, goes down a treat in Wagga Wagga and the electorate of Dickson. Even if it is a notorious fact that the inhabitants of these two regions have many more drug problems than the ACT, despite their politicians' moral leadership, and their local constabularies' best (if inept) efforts. Each, indeed, could be a poster for failure of policies focused on attacking sources of supply, without doing anything to reduce harm or demand.

One can expect that the federal government's intervention will also command the active support of senior federal police officials, much given to holding media conferences alongside large drug seizures at which they proclaim they have "smashed" the drug smugglers. Yet it's possible to argue that both the supply of, and the demand for, illegal drugs would be much lower if the AFP (and Border Force) played no role in trying to "regulate" it.

Oddly, their efforts never appear to have any effect on the price of illegal drugs, or on its availability, locally or nationally. Legal police activity in the war against drugs mainly serves to prop up the price and to make the trade very profitable for those involved; illegal police activity in the war against drugs is one of the chief sources of official corruption in Australia today.

One could look in vain through the objects and functions clauses of legislation establishing the NCA to find any active purpose of protecting citizens against themselves.

The NCA has no brief to control how, why, where or when the drug laws of the ACT are enforced. Frankly, I doubt it has the power to impose restrictions of the type it has, because its powers were given to it for an entirely different purpose. Even those who shudder at the thought of the progressive ACT pioneering pill testing in Australia (which is commonplace in Europe) might ask themselves whether the NCA's board members, or chief executive, are the sort of folk to whom one would entrust the decision.

If, of course, they are simply enforcing the will of the federal cabinet, or the Minister for Territories, they should say so. The law gives the federal minister the right to give written directions to the NCA, which must report them in its annual report, perhaps a year from now.

The NCA's board members are essentially business folk, with, to my delicate mind, perhaps a little too much background in aspects of making money from property development. I am sure that each deeply loves Canberra in her or his own way, but their history within it, background in its concerns, or expertise in moral, criminal or social concerns does not make obvious any capacity to make sensitive judgments on drug policy.

According to the NCA website, the chairman is Terry Weber, who, when away from his work on the Canberra Raiders board, is a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers who "provides specialist guidance in the areas of property, infrastructure, and facilities management, financial management and service delivery models for Australian and international governments and major corporate organisations".

Also on the board is Chris Faulks, the former chief executive of the Canberra Business Council, an organisation "that forms strategic alliances with industry and government to support Canberra's economic development". Glenn Keys, a former Defence officer now also at the business council and the chief executive of Aspen Medical, "one of the leading providers of outsourced healthcare solutions"; and Dennis Richardson, another member of the Raiders board, who has at various times headed the Defence Department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and ASIO. I should say in Richardson's defence that he was neither at ASIO nor on the NCA board when, in the NCA's second-weakest hour, it abandoned all of its functions and raison d'etre to supinely approve the construction of the Lubyanka, glassily glowering to the south along Constitution Avenue.

NCA boards have never before agonised "about the safety of people attending events on national land", the words used by a spokeswoman to justify the intervention. If she was speaking for the Commonwealth as opposed to the little old NCA, she might have said so.

I cannot recall any similar concern for public safety during the Canberra Hospital implosion, where a young girl died, or when the parliamentary triangle was made a noisy racetrack for powerful cars. Perhaps it learnt something from both debacles, though if that was boldness in the public or the national interest it has not otherwise been evident. A supposedly independent statutory authority, subject to an independent board, capable of being bent to the government's will only by written direction, might well be named the National Carpet Authority.

That one of its former chief executives is now on the ACT government payroll, spruiking the success of the West Basin real-estate development, accentuates the authority's lack of clout and status.

I expect that the minister to whom the board kowtows is Sussan Ley, a former Canberra citizen, and, until she became involved in Gold Coast property matters, a former health minister. While federal health minister Greg Hunt is not "owning" the NCA's decision, he has said the Commonwealth will not reconsider its opposition to pill testing.

The board's silence as to whether it is following direction damages it and the NCA generally. Many people want a more powerful and better funded NCA, with guts and a strong sense of its proper purpose. But that will falter if it decides to become a second chamber of the ACT Legislative Assembly. An activist NCA with views on political, as opposed to planning, issues will quickly run out of authority and legitimacy.

A revived NCA focused on its real function might be able to rescue us from an ACT government seemingly bent on destroying many of the national capital's best features. If there is no NCA to insist on fidelity to good planning concepts, good design, good architecture, quality building standards and the preservation of both the built and the natural environment, who will?

With self-government 29 years ago, the NCA was given powers to override the ACT government on land planning matters. The NCA was to be a trustee for the interest of all Australians in the quality of the national capital. By contrast, many feared that the ACT government would be full of short-termist and greedy politicians, who might end up dealing with the ACT's city, land and environment like local government councillors in NSW. When, in due course, just such tensions arose, the advocates for letting everything rip, including all too often their federal representatives, tended to suggest that this proved the dual system could not work. To the contrary, it proved it was working, and, as it happened in early days, mostly for the benefit of the nation and Canberrans.

It was an American-style check and balance. Canberra, particularly in its national capital aspects, was for the ages. The vision, plan and broad environment deserved firm stewardship against those who willing to drop standards, to compromise the territory's birthright or environment, or to destroy the city's setting, systems of roads and streetscapes, and core features, including the lake, key roads and primary national buildings. Even those who had expected that local government would create an ethical and moral for-profit environment like that regularly found in Sydney and Wollongong municipalities could hardly have imagined the triumph of mateship, cronyism and secrecy that developed, or its resistance to any notion of transparency, public consultation or accountability.

It was by no means the only deliberately inbuilt tension between mother and child. Another involved the allowance given to the departing child. Canberra did not get self-government primarily because the arguments of people favouring the idea of a right and a duty of Canberra citizens to govern themselves prevailed. We were thrown out of the nest. Federal (Labor) ministers thought that sustaining the costs of managing the territory was a burden, and that more of those costs should be imposed on Canberrans. If we wanted silk roads, we should tax ourselves to pay for them. Likewise with schools, health facilities and local government services of very high quality, being paid, it was said, by ordinary Australians without access to such quality.

That many Canberrans sensed that self-government would mean fewer services and higher taxes, and probably second-rate politicians and bureaucrats, was one reason many people opposed the idea of self-government. Alas for them, that wasn't a choice.

The Canberra Times has tended to support the view of the NCA when it has come into conflict with territory planners. This was from hostility to Canberra's growth and development, or to change in how the city was organised. It comes from a feeling that a long view of the future of the city and its citizens is preferable to short-term thinking, posited on the idea that development, any development, meant jobs and was thus unopposable.

It also comes from some pride that while the Canberra we knew had sometimes failed to excite or to lead, it had seldom settled for the inferior, the second-rate, reduced standards, or a quality of amenity lower than had been enjoyed here for generations. Still less did Canberra depend on massive appropriations of public property from the public into the private sector, before, after massive profits had been extracted, passage into the hands of hapless citizens.

Over the first 75 years of federation, Liberal as much as Labor politicians had deplored land speculation in the ACT, declaring that there was profit enough to be made from improvements on the land.

My outrage at the NCA trick is not founded on the notion that it is for the people of the ACT, not the nation as a whole, to decide about social policies such as pill clinics. I myself think the ACT government position better (and braver) on this one, but it is not necessarily a matter of local sovereignty as a matter of principle. Those saying local sovereignty is a fundamental principle use such arguments only when it suits them. I was recently reminded that Labor teamed with smaller parties in the Senate to quash legislation by Gary Humphries' (Liberal) government that would have converted 99-year leases to 999-year leases. Amen to that.

My objection is to abuse of a power given for another purpose. It was T. S. Eliot, I think, who spoke of the last temptation as the "greatest treason – to do the right deed for the wrong reason". Or the wrong deed for the wrong reason. And all the more detestable when it is mere posturing, or what today's conservatives sometimes call "virtue signalling".

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com