Table of Contents
For at least a generation, Australia has been regarded as, ‘constitutionally speaking’, a frozen continent (Sawer 1967). In the face of social and economic change and diverse pressures for adaptation in the structures of government, there has been little change, since 1901, in the formal structures of our federal system or success in updating the formal text of the federal Constitution. In reality, however, Australia’s systems of government and public administration have been anything but static. Indeed, since the times of Australia’s Indigenous political geography – particularly over the 10,000 years since the last ice age – systems of social governance across the ‘island continent’ have been extremely adaptive. Ever since British colonisation began in earnest in the 1820s, movements for the political separation of colonies and blueprints for local, district and provincial government have produced a rich tapestry of options for postcolonial governance, many of them still fundamental in enduring institutions (Brown 2005, 2006). Administrative innovation to cope with Australian demography and economic geography has been ongoing since before the advent of responsible government in the 1850s, and accelerated by Federation in 1901 and the rise of the modern federal welfare state through the late 20th century.
More recently, pressures of economic, environmental and social sustainability in the face of a globalising world have introduced entirely new interactions between politics and administration, government and the community, and the different levels of government. Although formal changes in intergovernmental power-sharing have been minimal, massive practical shifts have occurred on the back of changing judicial interpretations of Commonwealth and state power. Most recently, the High Court’s invalidation of many state taxes in 1997 (Ha 1997) led directly to a New Tax System based on the new federally-collected Goods and Services Tax (GST), and the Court’s 2006 interpretation of federal power to regulate corporations has changed the landscape of federal and state industrial relations (WorkChoices 2006), with further areas of regulation set to follow. Federal proposals to take over the regulation of water rights across the nation’s largest river system, the Murray-Darling Basin, are indicative of the appetite for change in the fundamentals of who runs what within our system of government. When it comes to the politics and practice of Australian federalism, we live in very interesting times.
Many Australians regard the main direction of change in Australia’s systems of government, since the 1940s, as primarily one of centralisation – the growth of federal power, and the progressive decline in influence of the once-powerful state governments (Craven 2005, 2006). However the picture is not so simple, especially when the extent of public support for change, and the causes of this growing federal influence, are closely analysed. With the strong trend to more uniform and consistent national regulation of business and the economy, state governments have bounced back with innovation in the design and delivery of social services (see Twomey and Withers 2007). Local government, always the poor cousin if not ‘lame duck’ in the Australian federal system, has grown rapidly in capacity and importance. Pressure for increased federal spending and intervention on matters such as environmental management, are indicative not only of public demands for more coordinated, national approaches, but for more action and greater flexibility ‘on the ground’. More decentralised governance approaches have evolved, not only economically through privatisation and contracting-out of services, but in the form of new strategies of community engagement and place management (e.g. Beer, Bellamy, Podger, this volume). Despite the lack of change in the formal structures of federalism, unprecedented attention is being given to how Australia can progress towards a more responsive, adaptive system of government. Within the pressures for stronger central action lie at least as many pressures for devolution in the resources and capacity to deal with today’s pressing social, economic and environmental challenges.
This chapter seeks to frame an important new set of questions confronting Australian governance, by seeking to reconcile these apparently inconsistent trends in public policy – dramatic centralisation in federal-state relations on one hand, yet on the other, a major new interest in improved policy and service delivery capacities at decentralised levels. Why is Australia experiencing both of these trends at the same time, and are they as inconsistent as they superficially appear? The answers are interrelated. By positing five key facts about the nature of Australian federalism, and eliciting five lessons from Australian political and constitutional history about the relationship between federalism and regionalism, the chapter seeks to demonstrate that it is perfectly logical that centralising and decentralising pressures should be found operating together within contemporary governance debates. Indeed, as many chapters in this book reinforce, it appears to be at least partly because of public dissatisfaction with Australia’s strong history of centralised governance at the state level, that successive federal governments have come under such strong pressure (or viewed another way, have been given the political opportunity) to intervene and interfere in so many policy areas traditionally lying at state and local levels. But if state governments are perceived as having had such trouble, historically, in delivering quality governance outcomes in an effective, efficient and responsive way, then what hope does an increasingly interventionist national government have for doing so, or even for finally forcing change in long-established patterns of state government behaviour? If the effort is to yield sustainable outcomes, it is now important to better chart the institutional implications of these shifting relationships between the different levels – formal and informal – of the Australian federation.