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Australia’s creaking federalism is back in the news, as events cause us to reflect on the appropriateness of our system of governance.
There is nothing surprising in this, since federalism is supposed to be a dynamic form of government. We see such dynamism also in the international scene. Not so long ago, Belgium moved from being a unitary to a federal country to accommodate cultural and linguistic differences. Great Britain established new regional assemblies in Scotland and Wales and devolved some central powers to them. Italy and Spain have experienced a resurgence of regionalism driven by cultural and economic forces, and the European Union itself has ignited the aspirations of regions within its member states with its generous subsidies and grants channelled directly for sub-national regions, occurring at the same time as the implementation of its general policies on subsidiarity and mutual recognition of laws. Canada fairly recently (1999) created a new self-governing territory – Nunavut – for its Inuit peoples. Countries in conflict and post-conflict situations have often turned to federalism principles as a way of combining local identity with unity, such as solutions proposed for Cyprus, Jerusalem and Kosovo. Even strong growth economies with unitary systems of government, like Japan, China, Thailand and Indonesia, experience regional tensions as they grow, and look to federal finance arrangements to address their need to share wealth creation between urban and rural or coastal regions, and to achieve a fair balance in tax and expenditure sharing between central and regional governments.
The key lesson in all of this contemporary experience is that systems of governance, to survive, need to be dynamic and not static. Change is a normal circumstance. Both unitary and federal systems alike are pursuing unity with diversity, underpinned by sound governance arrangements to protect the economic and cultural sustainability of their regions, which is now accepted as the price of nationhood.
Any attempt to rethink Australian governance arrangements would do best to revisit the approach of Henry Parkes, the key leader of the federation movement, who called the founders to that historic Constitutional Convention in Sydney in 1891. Parkes had made overtures and visits to the other colonies to engage in consultation well before that seminal event and, in his famous Tenterfield Oration, he made it clear that the achievement of national unity was his underlying motive. As he put it so eloquently, ‘the crimson thread of kinship runs through us all’. When the Convention finally gathered in Sydney, Parkes began the proceedings by putting forward a set of principles for discussion and consensus before any work might begin on constitutional design and drafting (see Quick and Garran 1901; Wiltshire 1991). The two great lessons from this experience, for any ongoing reform of governance, are to ensure that the prime goal is to retain a sense of nationhood, and to agree on basic principles before becoming enmeshed in debates about maps, boundaries, functions, taxes, and roles.