As John Howard and Brendan Nelson might well remark, there can be few things less palatable than Australian federalism, and most of these live at the bottom of stagnant ponds.
At a time when the Commonwealth Government is eyeing off areas of State responsibility ranging from universities to industrial relations, via technical colleges and uniform defamation laws, an enthusiasm for the continued existence of the States is treated in most enlightened quarters as evidence of a disposition both degenerate and sinister, like a leery street corner lout or a mangy, uncertain-looking mongrel. To profess oneself a ‘centralist’, even to propose the abolition of the States altogether, is merely to demonstrate intellectual breeding, and seemingly represents universal Australian political wisdom, from Whitlam to Howard.[1]
The reality, however, is that the debate is nowhere near as one-sided as enthusiasts for unlimited central power might like to think.
The anti-federalist case
The customary starting point for anti-federalists is to deny the key-argument for the continued existence of the States: that they are seriously different. They therefore demand, with heavy sarcasm, the exact details of the cultural gulf between Toowoomba and Launceston. They seek elaboration of the profound ethnic differences between the ancient tribes of South and Western Australia. They wonder aloud whether French or German is spoken in Melbourne, and how it is that Sydney speaks Swahili. Ironic payload delivered, they bluntly observe that the people of the Australian States spring from on original homogeneous stock, since varied more or less uniformly by migration; speak a common language; enjoy an identical political and legal heritage; and live according to the same distressing customs and usages.
This usually is combined with an attack upon the physical reality of the States. The Rhine and the Pyrenees may substantially define France, and Italy certainly subsists betwixt the Alps and the Mediterranean, but what sweeping mountain range or rolling river runs ruler-straight for two thousand kilometres to separate Western Australia from its neighbours? What inexorable rule of geography, ethnicity or economy decrees that Broken Hill should be in New South Wales rather than South Australia, or that Brisbane should not pay provincial tribute to Sydney, or that Victoria should not achieve lebensraum by re-annexing the part of New South Wales it lost in an imperial boundary reshuffle in 1842?[2] The States are not real geographical or communal entities. They deserve precisely the respect accorded other relics of imperial indifference to reality, like ceremonial uniforms in the tropics and hot turkey at Christmas.
At this stage, detractors of the States deploy their heavy guns: Waste, Expense, Duplication and Inefficiency. In terms of waste and expense, much is made of the existence of separate State governments, Parliaments and bureaucracies. Predictably, State Parliaments come under particularly heavy fire as rats’ nests of inferior-standard politicians. How, it is asked, can a country of twenty million souls afford seven Parliaments—nine, counting the pygmy dumas of the Territories—comprising thirteen chambers and literally hundreds of dubiously selected parliamentarians, some of whose electorates must consist of termite mounds and feral goats? How can the same suffering nation shoulder the burden of a federal, six State and two territory public services, like some bureaucratic Atlas carrying upon its shoulders every rostered-day-off and interdepartmental inquiry ever imagined?[3]
As regards duplication and inefficiency, the States’ critics argue that a nation possessing seven departments of health, seven departments of education and seven departments of transport must be either the fittest, best read and most mobile nation on earth, or suffer from a Byzantine bureaucratic complexity that would make the most lugubrious Whitehall mandarin grin. They politely suggest that transferring a student from one State education system to another should not be as difficult as obtaining import permission for commercial quantities of plague bacillus. They inquire pointedly whether the greater challenge for Australian business is to compete profitably or to comply with seven different systems of law, and whether the most dangerous health problem facing Australians might not be the co-ordination of their own fractured health care system.[4]
Nor are these detractors prepared to tolerate the States as self-proclaimed temples to self-government. On the contrary, they are monuments of complication, standing like heritage-classified lavatory blocks in the way of every project of national importance. Be it in the context of the national economy, the national health, the national education agenda or the national project for wombat domestication, there will be some rogue Premier, bandit department or rascal gang of State parliamentarians ready to hold any good idea to extravagant parochial ransom, or slit its throat with a blade marked ‘States’ Rights’.
Things then get personal. Not only are the States unnecessary, duplicatory and inefficient, but like football louts, most of them are stupid and uncouth as well. How, comes the bray from Collins and Pitt Streets, can one expect ‘outlying’ States like Western Australia and Tasmania to produce Parliaments and governments capable of sophisticated policy analysis? Even supposing such States actually to exist, their negligible populations can no more be expected to produce an adequate quota of enlightened legislators than Dapto to foment a literary movement. If a ‘Western Australian Rhodes Scholar’ is a euphemism for one who has achieved in the utter absence of competition, then a Queensland Premier is a be-suited hillbilly and a Tasmanian parliamentarian a talking wallaby. Far better these provinces be ruled from Melbourne and Sydney, through their bastard child Canberra, where there is civilisation to spare.
This accusation can be pressed further. With their restricted gene pools and tribal leaderships, the ‘outlying’ States—and there is an entire philosophy of condescension in that distancing adjective—can only function as arenas of horror and farce. Their social policies will be redneck fantasies, replete with atrocities towards Aboriginal people, the persecution of homosexuals, brutal punishment of minor offenders and the sort of general human rights abuse that occurs only in strict kindergartens. Not only are these horrors evil per se, but deeply embarrassing to a civilised Australia, struggling to take its rightful place in international café society.
Most anti-federalists dream of abolishing the States as most motorists dream of a world without speed cameras. Australia’s affairs then would be handled by a benign Commonwealth government, ruling under a Pax Canberrum through talented civil servants distributed throughout the former States. The complexities of State law would be unsnarled; State inefficiencies dissolved; ghastly State politicians exiled back to their barren wastes and cuisine-deficient hamlets; and the savage instincts of certain State populations firmly restrained. God would be, if not in His heaven, then hovering in the close vicinity of Capital Hill.
Sadly, even the most sanguine enemy of the States recognises that this centralist Jerusalem is unlikely ever to be built in Australia’s dry and sunny land. The abolition of the States would require the greatest referendum in Australia’s history, and referenda have the same success rate as reheated soufflés. Worse, no State, but particularly the resentful peripheries of Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland, could be relied upon to vote for its own extinction, yet another instance of bloody-minded self-absorption. Necessarily, most centralisers regretfully have abandoned abolition as unachievable, and look to less direct means of pursuing their object.
Federalism: a polite defence
The starting point here is to understand that the standard attack on Australian federalism, like unsolicited brochures from real estate agents, is not entirely selfless. Its authors do not propose the annihilation of the States so that Australians might frolic free from government interference: rather, as the States are hustled from the stage, the Commonwealth will make its modest entrance as arbiter of all things. Soaring condemnations of the inefficiency, incompetence and irrelevance of the States need to be heard as corresponding pleas to the Australian people to submit themselves to the tender joys of unbridled national government. As the sign in Government offices would read: ‘Trust me, I’m the Commonwealth’.
The rhetoric of States-phobia also often implies that federalism is an eccentrically Australian affliction, like some of the less attractive species of stinging jellyfish. This is untrue. Not only are there many federations in the world, but some of them—the United States, Canada and Germany, to name three—are among the most industrially advanced, human rights-conscious, culturally rich nations on the planet.[5] Even the doctrinaire anti-federalist will find it extremely difficult to argue that federalism has crippled the United States’ capacity to deal with urgent national imperatives—the New Deal and comprehensive victory in the Second World War strongly suggest otherwise—or that Canada, sweetheart of the constitutional left for its advanced Charter of Rights and chronic constitutional correctness, is some sort of icy Zimbabwe.
As an added embarrassment, federalism currently is enjoying something of an international revival, with the constitutionally super-cool European Union emerging as a quasi federation, the United Kingdom moving in the same general direction with legislatures for Scotland and Wales, and federalism being mooted as a solution to the political problems of places as diverse as Belgium, Ireland and Iraq.[6] In short, there is nothing internationally disreputable about federalism, and its Australian version is not necessarily a constitutional Bazza McKenzie.
The reality of difference
On the issue of diversity, adherents of the States concede that large differences—race, language and basic culture—will not be found on either side of the Murray River, at least since Victoria’s surrender to poker machines. Their argument is that the distinctiveness of the States lies not in the big and obvious, but in an accumulation of smaller, subtler differences. In a country priding itself on size and obviousness—a Big Country, sweeping plains, and a noisy national cricket team—any attempt to demonstrate significant difference in pastel tones is a brave one. Nevertheless, Australia’s federalists put up a determined case.
They begin with the simple point that Australia is indeed a big, even a vast, country, and that in vast countries there are widely varying conditions of climate, geography, society and economy. For example, after assuring Sydneysiders that the Kimberley is indeed a region of tropical Western Australia and not a Darlinghurst nightclub, they explain that no one standing on the pier at Broome, gazing across sweeping tides into an unguessable interior, ever will discern the hazy outlines of the Opera House, and that even a denizen of metropolitan Perth will be more troubled by the prospect of a cyclone hitting this sultry outpost of their own State than yet another tragic Sydney hailstorm. Other instances of Australian geographic federal reality may then be explored: that Tasmania actually is an island cut off from the mainland; that Perth is further from Sydney than Sydney from New Zealand; that Cooktown is less like Melbourne than Melbourne resembles London; and that Adelaide is not the shabby suburb just past Kogarah.
These real differences of place interact with equally real political and social differences. Few would deny that a vital issue besetting Australia today is the need for reconciliation between European and Aboriginal people. Yet we rarely appreciate that the attitude of European Australians toward reconciliation will be fundamentally shaped by their experience of Aboriginal people, which will in turn vary directly and profoundly according to a person’s State of origin. Put simply, most Victorians rarely meet an Aboriginal person, so the issue essentially is an abstract one; Western Australians interact with Aborigines every day, for good or ill, and so the issue is personal.
In more general terms, there is a palpable sense of political and psychological disengagement the further one moves in Australia from Sydmelberra, the sacred band of country that runs at a sanitary distance from Newcastle to a point acceptably distant from Geelong, extending inland as far as the staff bar at the Australian National University. You realise you are a long way from anywhere that matters when you sit for the sixth hour in Perth airport, waiting for an engine part to arrive from Melbourne, watching a television weather report about Sydney, cursing that there the lone direct flight from the State capital of Western Australia to Canberra leaves at midnight.
One may be similarly sceptical of arguments denying the distinctiveness of the States by virtue of the artificiality of their boundaries. In the first place, this artificiality can be exaggerated. True, Broken Hill could be in South Australia, but Albany definitely is in the West, and Townsville could only be in Queensland, or perhaps Alabama. In any event, the question is not whether the boundaries were real when drawn up, but whether they are real now, 150 years later. Sheltering behind them, the State communities have had a century and a half to develop their own laws, institutions and personality. New South Wales as a political entity, for example, is older than the now-defunct English Union with Ireland, every French Republic, and a united Italy. To say that it may have developed just a touch of personality is not unreasonable.
Constitutional desirability
Putting aside such issues of communal psychology, partisans of Australian federalism are more than willing to defend it on the grounds of constitutional desirability.[7] Their launching pad is the hallowed ground of democracy and popular participation. Whatever else the States (and particularly the remoter States) may do, they guarantee their populations a voice in the issues most affecting them. If Western Australia did not exist as a formal constitutional amalgam of belligerent miners and sun-stroked secessionists, what real capacity would it have to influence the counsels of Canberra on issues of local significance? True, it would have its pitiful handful of parliamentary seats, but on any local issue that also scrambled onto the national stage—say, the preservation of some internationally esteemed reptile at the paltry cost of a few thousand sandgroper jobs—mere electoral logic would dictate that such Western Australian affairs were to be resolved according to the wishes of those most concerned: the environmentally aware and vote-rich populations of Sydney and Melbourne.
Similarly, there must be some reason to suppose that the taking of locally important decisions by the State populations closest to them might actually produce better and more informed outcomes. The wisdom of Canberra is majestic, but does it really run to a deep understanding of the problems of educating young Aboriginal men in the Pilbara, the alienation of remote communities in western Tasmania, the peculiarities of the Brisbane sewage system and the plight of the urban platypus in Melbourne? By all means, let Canberra handle the national issues of defence, overseas trade and international rugby, but leave the running of Adelaide to someone who actually has slept there.
The cry that States Rights is Redneck Rights is received with equal scepticism. The first response is that redneck-ism often is a code word for failing to kowtow to the latest enthusiasm of central government. If the local democracy of federalism means anything, it means the power to reject some mad national scheme for the domestication of the Western Quoll, as well as to fall in with it. The States also note that, if the history of Western Australia and Queensland are murky upon issues like the rights of Aboriginal people, the report-card of the Commonwealth hardly is unblemished. With its own indifferent role in indigenous affairs, its cheerful internment of aliens during wartime, and its current robust approach towards asylum seekers, the neck of the Commonwealth sometimes displays a decidedly rosy hue.
The defence of the States on constitutional grounds also takes in the strategic hill of checks and balances. The straightforward argument is that federalism is a close geographical cousin of the separation of powers. Just as that doctrine inhibits tyranny by preventing a government from combining (for example) judicial and executive power, so the existence of the States means that no one government can exercise total power throughout Australia. Put simply, dictatorship is not possible in a country where no government simultaneously can determine parking fines in Hobart and the price of dingos in Darwin.[8] There is a cruder political, as well as a high constitutional element to this argument. The existence of the States and the vagaries of Australian electoral politics guarantee that virtually any Commonwealth Government, no matter how popular, will face a sustained policy critique by hostile State governments. Federalism ensures that, like some harassed parent pursued by grizzling offspring in a supermarket, the Commonwealth Government spends a healthy amount of time publicly justifying its decisions.
A final rampart of the States is the classical American assertion that they provide a vital range of social laboratories in which economic and policy experiments may be deployed and evaluated. Critics of the States visualise such laboratories as the haunts of mad-scientist Premiers, who mate racism with electoral fraud, but the reality is more complex. An enormous variety of Australian social reforms ranging from road safety laws, to the regulation of prostitution, to the management of drug-related problems has begun in one State, and finally swept like the fox or rabbit (if more benignly) across the continent.[9] Particularly enlightened States may even blaze the way for the Commonwealth, silvered comrades still tearily recalling the safari-suited paradise of Don Dunstan’s South Australia, just as conservatives revere the Victoria of Jeff Kennett for having borne the first equivocal fruits of privatisation.
Duplication and waste
On the fiery issues of waste, inefficiency and duplication, the States give as good as they get. They begin with the obvious point that government is not all about economy and efficiency: democracy itself is slow and messy, but we have yet to abandon it in favour of a fast, logical dictatorship. In the same way, if we have to pay a price for the diversity, democracy, and independence of the States, we can file the bill under ‘Value’. Beyond this, the States tersely observe that a good deal of the duplication experienced in areas like health and education occurs not because of their own incompetence but because a financially well-endowed Commonwealth has muscled in on their constitutional act. Blaming them for the resulting overlap is like criticising the householder for wrestling with the burglar over the video machine. If the Commonwealth wants dramatically to reduce jurisdictional overlap it has only to retreat to its own areas of constitutional competence, hand over the money, and the States will be happy to do the rest.
The States also look with a wry eye upon claims of their own financial extravagance, while comparing their threadbare public programmes with such models of fiscal restraint as Parliament House in Canberra, the High Court building and the comparative conditions of the State and federal public services.[10] They contemplate with bitter amusement the ‘savings’ that would accrue from their own abolition, and in their minds’ eye see each State governmental apparatus being absorbed, and then handsomely amplified by the Commonwealth, with a spanking new level of lavishly paid senior regional management, higher staffing levels and better office lavatories.
Unsurprisingly, the States can be testy about suggestions of their own incompetence and irrelevance. The quasi-ducal Premiers of Victoria and New South Wales in particular might wonder, gazing across the sky-scrapers of Melbourne and Sydney, precisely what the Squire of Canberra knows about running anything seriously big. Nothing, certainly, about the daily concerns of law enforcement, public health, utilities, town planning, running (as opposed to funding) schools and disaster relief. Tanks and treaties are important, but they do not amount to a functioning society.
The final riposte of the States is directed against the prospective joys of regional government. With a cynicism worthy of a courtier of the Emperor Caligula, they wonder loudly whether the true agenda behind a regionalised Australia is greater community control and coherent administration, or simply pervasive dictation by Canberra. Whatever the other virtues of regional governments, they would be created and ultimately disposable by Canberra, with no constitutional, referendum-protected existence of their own. Where a recalcitrant Western Australian Premier can say ‘No’ to the Commonwealth, gulp, and face the consequences, the best a nervous Gauleiter of Riverina could manage would be ‘Are you sure?’, and this at the risk of instant dismissal. Constitutionally guaranteed intergovernmental cheekiness would not survive the elimination of the States.
Wither the States?
As with the passenger pigeon and pre-marital chastity, there will be no sudden revival for the Australian States. No rich uncle will bequeath them a modest competence. The High Court will not repent and overturn the Engineers case[11] in a welter of apology. Most importantly, the Commonwealth will continue to grind away at the foundations of their authority like some huge subterranean drill, dislodging a chunk here, a boulder there, and if John Howard has his way, the occasional entirely cliff-face. Never again will the States stand on the commanding heights of 1900, nor even cling to the troublesome slopes of the 1930’s, but rather will concentrate all their energies on decelerating their painful slide through the scree of modern Australian federalism.
Until very recently, they might have hoped to be mildly successful in this attempt, less through their own efforts, than because they already are very close to the bottom of the hill. Even the sternest critics of the States had softened their calls for abolition, partly because they recognised its constitutional impracticability, but partly because, gazing fondly upon the wreckage of the States, there just did not seem a great deal of point. For much the same reasons, even the lesser goal of a constitutionally regionalised Australia could be regarded as all too much bother, like enthusiastically whacking a snake that is already dead.
But the Howard Government recently seems to have discovered an enthusiasm for beating the well-pulverised and throttling those already close to death. Many of its proposed incursions are in areas of State competence previously thought to have been safe on the unflattering grounds that no sane Commonwealth government could want to invade these administrative Vietnams: hospitals, schools and university curricula. These bets now seem, if not to be off, then at serious risk.
True, the States themselves have little reason to fear financial disaster, on the grounds that it already has befallen them. Once you are firmly in pawn to the Commonwealth, the only thing that can change is the amount: your thraldom is an established fact. This said, the current pinching of the GST tube is certain to give the patient some twitchy moments.
Ironically, the States must be reassessing the view of one of their most traditional tormentors, the High Court. Normally, the question for the States regarding the Court is that facing every wretched bankrupt as the bailiff carries off his children: well, what can they do to me now? Given that the Court has treated the States as the next thing to constitutional pariahs for the last 80 years, what new horrors can it inflict? Now, in the face of Howardite centralism, the States must be hoping against hope that its much-vaunted capital-C conservatives turn out to be capital-F federalists.
All in all, Australian federalism has entered an interesting phase. It has passed from bawling indigitation, through smouldering resentment, to a lingering, dull resignation. Now it is being prodded by the Commonwealth toe again. If it does not bite now, it almost certainly is because it has been worn down to the gums.
