Locally governed alternatives are even more difficult to imagine given the status of local government. What, then, of the National Party? Has it operated in the political dimension that the revivalists ignore? The answer must be yes, but it operates in the same governance framework as it has sought to change relations within the political dimension rather than change the institutions of it. There is, however, a streak of radicalism in Australia’s rural history. The proponents of new states apparently have had no difficulty in imagining drastic institutional change towards more regionalised governance.

The creation of new states has been a popular idea in many regional areas. It effectively means secession from existing states, but it is specifically allowed under the Australian Constitution if certain requirements are met. The new-state movement has roots in the creation of existing states, but has progressed no further despite the idea still retaining considerable support in Queensland and New South Wales at least. The idea that regional government should replace the states is also relatively popular, and not just in the rural areas that have been the wellsprings of new-state movements (Brown et al. 2006). While country-mindedness has promoted a rural-based political party, provided foundations for new-state movements in rural areas and generally been consistent with agrarian ideals of self-reliance, it has not helped to strengthen the only form of government residing in rural areas: local government. Nor has it successfully prompted effective agitation for reform of the federal system towards regionalisation.

Australia faces a governance dilemma: there is popular support for regionalisation at the same time as the states are losing influence to the Commonwealth, but local government does not currently provide a platform for devolution. The significance of the problem grows a little when trends towards ‘new local governance’ elsewhere, particularly in the United Kingdom, are considered. Here we see promotion of the idea of devolution alongside improvements in local governance (Stoker 2004). This comes amid the ever-present evidence that bottom-up, local initiative provides the best platform for promoting or ameliorating change and its effects and that central control can be unnecessary and undesirable (for a British environmental example, see Hinshelwood 2001). The significance of any change for the better in local governance has, however, been vigorously questioned (Bonney 2004). Some change to rural local governance, towards more participatory models, has been noted in Australia, but some of the old structures are persistent (Pini 2006). Moreover, it is hard to imagine ‘new localism’ taking hold in Australia: no Australian local council, with the possible exception of Brisbane City, has anything like the capacity to improve its environment as some of the big British cities have done. The debate in Australia remains focused on amalgamations of very small councils into slightly larger ones.

Research on rural local government has shown that the legitimacy of rural elected councillors rests on their ability to defend the interests of the locality, frequently against what are seen to be threats from central government, and initiatives that could conceivably bring rate increases are resisted (Gray 1991). The amalgamation of councils and the application of new management techniques, such as competitive tendering, have partially redefined local government, but nothing appears to have changed the traditional criteria for popular legitimacy (Welch 2002, using New Zealand and Australian illustrations). If there is a cultural problem, as suggested above, there doesn’t seem to be any change happening in local government to solve it. There could be something happening through central government attempts at ‘whole-of-government’ programming and participatory planning, but none of this indicates the rise of local institutions that could be expected to take initiatives in a climate of relative autonomy. In New Zealand, engagement and partnership have recently illuminated the continuing problems of local government legitimacy and implicitly support arguments for stronger regional governance (Scott and McNeill 2006). There is no institutional basis for such change in Australia. Just as the revivalists seek cultural change towards entrepreneurialism and have apparently found a platform for it in some towns, so we might consider the existence of a platform for more political cultural change towards the legitimisation of regionalism.