Government
Structure Reform Ideas
My 2007 PhD
thesis
dealt extensively with government structure reform options, with an
emphasis on the financial costs or benefits of reform options such as
New States, Unification - or the abolition of the States, regional
governments, and functional transfers to achieve national systems of
health, education, public order and safety, and so on. I am
confident that my thesis demonstrates that intelligent government
structure reform can achieve financial and economic benefits for
Australia amounting to about $50 billion (based on June 2002 dollar
values), or about five per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Chapter 5
of my thesis
observes that there's a good deal of consensus that gains in this order
are indeed possible through well designed government system reforms.
In May 2009 I
developed a government structure reform
plan called the Australia
United plan
(AUP), the latest version of which is shown here.
This plan was reported by Merran Hitchick in the 10 September
2009 edition of The
Land
newspaper in a feature series that included the article 'Is
it time to ditch the states?'. And later in
September 2009 I was invited to write an article on this plan for The
Order -
the National Magazine of the Order of Australia Association. The
article titled 'Abolish
the states and save $50 billion' appears on
page 4 of the Summer 2009–2010 edition of The
Order.
In June 2009 I
prepared a Critique
of the 2007 Paper by Anne Twomey and Glenn Withers titled Australia's
Federal Future:
A Report for
the Council for the Australian Federation. This critique has been
updated in July 2009.
The
Beyond Federation
network was formally
established on 8 January 2002 to encourage improvements to our
Constitution and system of government that will benefit Australia and
all Australians. Beyond Federation's aims and visions for a
socially, environmentally and economically sustainable Australia,
served by a "best possible" system of government, are set out in
the Beyond Federation Charter.
Twelve Shed
a Tier Congresses have been conducted
in which participants have shared thoughts on
government structure reform.
At the first of these Congresses, in Canberra on 22 June 2001, it
was agreed that an organisation should form, and by January 2002 Beyond
Federation's name and charter had been agreed and Beyond Federation was
formally established.
Links
to websites show that many Australians support
the abolition of State governments or closely related government
structure reforms, including a significant number of
Commonwealth
parliamentarians. The local
government sector has also shown
strong support for the abolition of State governments or similar
reforms, and a significant number of past and current State
parliamentarians support such reforms as well.
Australian local
governments and local government associations have consistently strived
for a better deal for local government and constructive reforms to
Australia's system of government generally. A local
government page
provides examples of such reform efforts.
Numerous surveys
and opinion polls over the years have
confirmed that a significant proportion of Australians support the
abolition of State governments or closely related reform of Australia's
system of government. Note especially
the extremely
significant findings of the Australia Institute in support of
national approaches to health, education and other functions under
Commonwealth government control.
Prime Minister
Rudd's 2020 Summit in April 2008 generated a lot of submissions that
called for various forms of government structure reform. A compilation
of 2020 Summit submissions that
contain government structure reform ideas has been prepared, and my
own submissions are also included here.
I don't have any
narrow preference for one particular model of government for Australia,
but do believe Australia would best be served by a system of government
comprising strong national and local governments that serious thinking
political scientists would probably classify as a decentralised unitary
system
of government with a degree of federal character. A system along
these lines would align with Australia's nationalist tradition and
provide strong close to the people local government for the first time
in our post-Federation history. A brief paper titled The
Dominance of Nationalism in Australia From Federation Till Current Times
has been prepared
to describe my understandings of the manner in which Australians
have supported nationalism far more than federalism.
I
believe the unitary-federal distinction is better described as a
continuum rather than a dichotomy, but also believe that federalist
ideology is more an article of faith than a coherent theory,
and that the academic study of federalism is generally
hollow, unscientific, dogmatic, overly legalistic, and
insufficiently relevant to the day to day lives of nearly all people.
It is sometimes claimed, for example, that federal systems
of government are inherently more decentralised than unitary systems.
As shown in Appendix
6A
of my PhD thesis, however, Australia's federal system of
government is one of the most centralised systems of government in the
world, amounting to little more than duplicated centralism.
Genuine decentralisation
is not achieved by assigning sovereign powers to States as huge as
NSW, or even as "huge" as the ACT (where the peripheralised
Gungahlin district, for example, is going to end up with
a population close to that of Wagga before it gains its full
set of K-12 public schools - another
story, but
an important illustration), but, rather, through a sort of
"micro-federalism" whereby every single person is assigned real
sovereignty, through a national bill of rights and
responsibilities or otherwise. The two scales of human
organisation at which sovereignty should be most strongly
emphasised in an island-continent-country such as Australia are (1) the
mutually reinforcing geographic scale of the island-country-continent
and (2) the scale of individual human beings. Families/households
and substantive local communities represent the next most
important scales, hence the need for strong local governments.
Governments at the scales of NSW (comprising a third of Australia's
population) and WA (a third of Australia's land area) benefit virtually
nobody except those on the respective gravy trains who gain directly
from the existence of the State governments of NSW, WA and
indeed all five of Australia's mainland States. Appendix
2E of my PhD
thesis examines scales of human organisation that may be
appropriate for Australian sub-national governments.
The shortcomings
of Australia's federal system of government seem to be most
pronounced in matters of life and
death gravity. There's abundant
evidence in federal constitutions of various countries (where powers
are transferred to the national government in times of emergency as
declared by the national government) and, above all, in concrete
evidence we see in disasters like Victoria's 2009 bushfire tragedy,
that
federalism is simply not designed to cope with emergency situations or
matters of life and death gravity generally. But whether we bring
the word "federalism" into
discussion or not, it is clear in any event that Australia's system of
government has not coped with matters of life and death gravity at all
well. With the 2009 Victorian bushfire disaster as a constant
reminder
of the failings of Australia's system of government, I hope and
genuinely believe that public debate in Australia will
increasingly converge upon the immense and obvious merits of,
and
urgent need for, a fully seamless national health system, and indeed a
fully seamless Australia under Commonwealth control for all matters of
life and death gravity,
ranging from water and environment, through aged and health
care, occupational health and
safety, ambulance and emergency
services (including bushfire protection), and policing, to
the military Defence and other national security functions (within
Foreign Affairs, Customs, the Federal Police etc.) already under
Commonwealth control.
I believe
Australia should have uniform national laws, so I believe Australia's
system of government should be unitary from a legal perspective, though
I accept the need, of course, for local variations in laws where
required due to substantive climatic or geographic needs.
With building
standards, for example, requirements in cyclonic regions and
areas at high risk of flooding and bushfires clearly need
to differ from those in place elsewhere. Such geographic and
climatic variations are already recognised in Australian
Standards
which, in turn, are often referred to in Australian laws and
regulations. I also believe that
local governments should be given significant functional and financial
powers, including the powers to enact by-laws within their areas
of responsibility, and that these powers should be set out in a
reformed Australian Constitution that provides for
local governments and assigns to such local governments the rights
to form, exist, raise their own revenues, receive a just
fair of
national revenue in accordance with the determinations of a reformed
Local Government Grants Commission, and exercise powers that would
also need to be specified in the Constitution. Such powers should
include the "roads, rates and rubbish" transport, infrastructure and
urban services type powers traditionally held by local governments
throughout Australia today, and additional roles in local and
regional development, health and human services, education
and so on.
I believe the
local government amalgamation debate has more than run its course.
Local government amalgamation advocates have been
highly successful in
achieving numerous amalgamations in the past two decades
in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania, New South Wales, and
Queensland, but Australian local governments are now huge in both land
area and population compared to those in countries like the United
States, Canada, and most European countries, as shown in Appendix
2D of my PhD
thesis.
Several members
of Beyond Federation have come up with reformed government structure
models, and I see significant merit in all of these. I often
think
Australia would be well served by a system of government like that of
California or Texas, comprising national, county and local/municipal
governments. The local/municipal governments would have
autonomous powers in such a system, and the counties would
be administrative arms of the national government operating at the
regional level.
I've had five
articles on government structure reform published on Online Opinion,
all between 2000 and 2002, as listed below. As these articles
indicate, I've previously (till about 2001) favoured a system
comprising national and regional governments as generally understood,
but have more recently (since 2002) favoured a system in which the
two principle levels of government are the national and local levels as
generally understood.
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