The states we’re in - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 19: Re-imagining Australia
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by AJ Brown
CALLS FOR THE ABOLITION of state governments, and their replacement with reconstituted local and/or regional governments, have resonated ever since. Moving beyond a system based on a half-baked colonial framework has long aligned with popular aspirations. Today business remains keen to support quite dramatic surgery to achieve simpler, more efficient and uniform approaches to national regulation. How to fix the problems of federalism is again a major political topic. But how are we approaching it? Has the quest for pragmatic solutions to the problems of our federal system broken down and lost contact with the larger scope of Australian's popular and political imagination?
Australians expect a democratic national government to act strongly to ensure the prosperity of the nation and protect its economic interests, but also to use its clout and financial strength to underwrite a community of interest based on social justice and equality of opportunity. They still see themselves as living in local and regional communities, not constrained or overshadowed by the limiting effects of ‘big' national government. They want the freedom to enjoy local differences, maximise opportunities and respond to sustainability challenges while retaining and developing a sense of ‘community'.
But these questions of how ‘community' can more effectively be politically recognised, in an increasingly centralised political system, again challenge us to use our larger imagination. Thankfully, the capacity of individual Australians to imagine further evolution in the system of governance remains undiminished. My research suggests that almost two-thirds of adult Queenslanders, and almost three-quarters of adult New South Welshmen and women, would prefer a system of governance in this century different to the federal system today. A stratified survey sample of more than five hundred NSW respondents even found that the group most likely to favour change was state government employees. Two-thirds of these favoured the abolition of their own state government and its replacement with regional governments in a new federal compact. Perhaps public servants are not always purely self-interested, and know when present structures are obstructing their ability to serve their communities in the best possible ways.
State governments are not about to be replaced tomorrow, and for the time being, remain crucially important to the system of government. But our imagination continues to tell us that two veins of political culture – federal and unitary – can still be mined to deliver the national constitution we have always wanted. Pragmatic as ever, we are already finding a range of interim, transitional solutions towards a better system, including a growing ‘fourth tier' of regional institutions – health boards, catchment management authorities – which are rarely properly listened to. A notoriously weak system of local government continues to grow slowly in stature and significance, with a renewed debate about its federal constitutional recognition included among the ‘revolutions' now promised by the Rudd Labor Government.
However, we are only just beginning to reconnect these small steps with our larger national vision. As prime minister, even John Howard recognised that the idea of state governments having ‘benign decentralist tendencies' was ‘something of a myth'. He detected two levels of political consciousness that mattered – the local and the national – and saw state identity as of little continuing importance. He may have dismissed ideas of radical reform as ‘pure theorising', but his view since at least 1991 was that ‘if you were starting Australia all over again you would have a national government and twenty regional governments'.
In the end Australians have shown they can be moved by the view that we could do a whole lot better in the fundamental structures of governance. This is clear from the history of federation itself. It would never have happened were it not for what Helen Irving calls the ‘utopian moment' when colonial electors voted in the late 1890s. This was, in Irving's words, ‘a time of both optimism and dismay, of disillusionment with old constitutional relations and of confidence in the local ability to forge new ones'.
The political wheel has turned from a fixation on economic conceptions of progress towards binding the nation's economic future into its social, environmental and political development. Confronted with a shrinking globe, international competition, and ecological fragility in the face of climate change, there is a renewed premium on better ways to govern ourselves. National unity, economic efficiency and policy responsiveness are part of the mix, but so the recognition that it is as communities – national, local and regional – that we lead our lives, innovate, sustain one another, and respond to the exigencies of a changing world. Like federation itself, imagining how formal systems of governance can adapt to better serve and protect this balance will remain part of the Australian psyche until finally it is achieved. ♦