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Australian Law Reform Commission - Reform Journal |
Reform Issue 78 Autumn 2001
This article appeared on pages 35– 38 & 73 of the original journal.
Regionalism & reform: towards federation’s 2nd century
By AJ Brown*
The task of law reform – ensuring our legal methods and structures evolve in line with the times – involves a number of processes, including constitutional and legislative reform and changes to administrative practice and public sector management.
Relatively rarely, however, do we stop to consider how all of these processes impact on daily political and economic life at once. We tend to choose one type of reform as the main solution for a particular problem, and take issues of constitutional structure and political culture as ‘givens’ within which we must work.
The relationship between Australian regionalism and federation is a question that demands a new perspective on how one might assemble the various options for reform. This article argues that there is a disjunction between regionalism as a political phenomenon and the legal forms that define the structure of sub-national government in Australia. This can only possibly be resolved through a broad reconsideration of all the reform options open to us.
The disjunction manifests itself in at least two ways.
Politics vs policy
The first manifestation is a conflict often experienced between political language and the reality of regionalism as a policy issue. In Australian politics, regionalism continues to be treated as the problem of how to ‘address a growing sense of alienation in many parts of regional Australia and to bridge the increasing gulf between metropolitan areas and the bush’.1 This is so, and has been for a long time. But the urban-rural divide is only one aspect of Australia’s regionalism, and is not necessarily always the key factor.
Being part of ‘regional, rural and remote Australia’ is anything but a homogeneous condition. Arguably, the treatment of rural areas as one uniform social category, rather than a patchwork of many regions, each with its own economic and political identity, is a large part of the problem. Further, urban and suburban areas form regions in themselves, with their own various regional needs. Achieving a workable political understanding of Australian regionalism requires some movement beyond the urban-rural binary split. It requires a jump from continued entrenchment of the concept of regions as peripheral to the urban capitals to a centrifugal concept in which each region (whether rural, urban or suburban) is treated as a centre in its own right. On this view, ‘the regions’ are not a generic category of backblocks, defined only by their relationship with seven cities, but rather a network of self-defining territories.
This policy understanding is a prerequisite to formulating a full picture of the complexity of legal forms used by governments to create and deliver policy at the regional level. Australia’s matrix of regions provide the meeting place for one federal government, at least one and sometimes two of the eight states and territories, a handful of local governments or self-governing Indigenous territories, and any number of the different administrative regional used by Commonwealth and state agencies to structure their regional programs.
These legal forms are often informal, usually evolving, and marked by countervailing trends of consolidation and streamlining on one hand, and program proliferation on the other. Much of this works well – and much of what doesn’t may be unavoidable. However, we will never know what is workable unless we first understand what it is to be ‘regional’. In fact, the lack of underlying consensus would itself tend to suggest natural limits on the ability of many institutions to provide Australia’s regional character with a ‘best fit’.
Political theory vs constitutional form
The irony of the above conflict is that Australian political theory is capable of delivering an institutional structure with whatever ‘fit’ Australian regionalism needs – at least in principle. There is no better time than the centenary of federation to reflect on the inherent advantages of a ‘federal republic’ for delivering a system of government which – again, in principle – devolves strong political, institutional and economic clout to its constituent regions.2 But here a parallel and strikingly similar disjunction appears.
Helen Irving’s Centenary Companion to Australian Federation identifies a federation as ‘a union of separate and semi-autonomous regional parts ... in which the power to make laws is divided between a central legislature and regional legislatures’.3 So much is good. But what are the ‘regional’ parts granted this autonomy under the Australian union, and where are these ‘regional’ legislatures with power to make laws? The response is accurate, but brings us up sharply against a brick wall: in Australia, ‘the centre is the Commonwealth and the regions are the states’.
Are our regions our states? With the exception of Tasmania and perhaps partial exception of Victoria, it seems improbable that most Australians would really think so. In fact, political history underlines this with evidence that many Australians have never thought so. In 1892, Henry Parkes took the view that after federation it would ‘add immeasurably to the importance of the new Commonwealth’ and be of ‘immense advantage’ to its constituent parts ‘if four or five new colonies [states] were cut out’ of the ‘vast and unmanageable territories’ of at least Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland.4 Further, Irving and her contributors tend to confirm that our different states, while they do have different political cultures, are not sufficient to explain the nation’s political geography. If you seek additional guidance from the Centenary Companion’s index on the meaning of ‘regional’, the entry for ‘regionalism’ will refer you not to ‘colonies’ or ‘states’, but to ‘separation and secession movements’.5
This history opens up a whole new range of possibilities. It is a tale of colonial political activism that would have at least doubled the number of states in the federation. Add the New State movements into which they evolved in the 20th century, and the sometimes parallel agenda for reconstituting a regional level of government by abolishing rather than propagating states, and again we have a picture of a political regionalism more vibrant than we sometimes allow.
The reasons why no such reconstitutions have ever happened and why the Australian federation retains the boundaries of 1861 requires examination. Indeed, it would be wrong to assume the structure has not changed in other ways: development in local government systems being but one example. Yet the Constitutional Centenary Foundation’s national program of Local Constitution Conventions (as at 1999) still recommended movement towards ‘a [federal] system based on regions or, at least, a larger number of States’. We may have achieved a great deal, but how much of it might be a surrogate for the ‘real’ federation that we never had? To what extent do current political grapplings with regionalism suggest federation still has more to offer?
Broadening the vision for reform
The celebration of a successful first century of federation poses the question: what next? For many, no doubt, experience of past reform efforts continues to weigh heavily, making it best to leave constitutional structures as they are and continue to ‘muddle through’. After all, as Irving has written elsewhere, it took something of a ‘Utopian moment’ to tip a majority of Australians in all the colonies into voting for federation in the first place. Even then, almost 30 per cent of votes cast in 1899-1900 were ‘no’ votes, and more than 30 per cent of those enrolled to vote elected not to do so.
All the same, the question is clearly not whether the place of regionalism within federalism will be the subject of ongoing reform, but rather which reform paths are to be chosen. In selecting a path, the tension between ‘pragmatism and vision’, of which the Constitutional Centenary Foundation’s Federalism Forum (October 2000) announced itself to be ‘acutely aware’, is something to be welcomed and managed, rather than avoided:
‘The Australian federal system is grounded in a Constitution that is 100 years old and that has proved hard to change. In the short term, therefore, reform must take the Constitution as a given and seek ways to improve its operation in practice. If a longer view is taken, however, it may be desirable to seek more substantial structural change involving alteration of the Constitution itself.6
One of the great virtues of existing federalism is that it is not necessarily the Constitution that provides any major barriers to change. With Chapter VI came a variety of machinery for realigning regionalism and federalism, albeit not yet used. That it will be used, however, is almost inevitable. In 1998, it was mainly political accident and mismanagement that prevented the Northern Territory’s 194,000 citizens from taking up the Commonwealth’s offer to become Australia’s seventh state. When that does happen, what will then be a fair constitutional deal for the 220,000 citizens of Cairns and Far North Queensland? Or the 195,000 citizens of North/North-West Queensland, including Townsville and Mt Isa? Or the 305,000 residents of Rockhampton and Capricornia, or much of Western Australia, and so on?
The prerequisites for such a process to occur, with confidence that an improved and more cost-effective polity will result, are challenging. The alternative, however, is an uncertain and divisive fragmentation of some parts, without sufficient consideration of what it really means today to be a state, or what states might be capable of, and without any fundamental understanding of the character and role of our ‘natural’ regions.
It cannot be claimed that our politics is incapable of the necessary consensus. Federation itself, albeit predating modern party politics, involved a wide-ranging debate on the principles and practical benefits of major reform, creating bedfellows out of strange political foes. In 1958 in deep north Queensland, Labor and Country Party parliamentarians were quite capable of working together to jointly table mass petitions for two new states, notwithstanding Labor’s then 40-year-old pledge to abolish the Senate and the states altogether. The 20 years of microeconomic reform since 1980, which underpin much of contemporary ‘collaborative federalism’, has itself reflected a consensus unseen since the 1920s, even though it is now searching for new ideas and differentiations.
Fortunately, just as Australian federalism has passed beyond being seriously in question, so too Australian regionalism is only going to mature and develop with time. If federalism is becoming increasingly attractive globally, this is not because it can sometimes work more efficiently than other systems, but because in an age of global economic and political integration, it marries democracy and policy cohesion with other fundamental principles of social organisation including cultural diversity and geographic scale. Fundamentally, its attractiveness derives from its ability to harness – by protecting and encouraging – the political identity of regions. Political theory tells us that it is only when we get that balance right, using an unrestricted range of constitutional and sub-constitutional tools, that Australian federalism will truly be capable of delivering the best of what it has to offer.
* AJ Brown is a Fellow of the Key Centre for Ethics Law Justice & Governance, Griffith University, Brisbane.
Endnotes
1. J Anderson and I McDonald Regional Australia: Meeting the Challenges Commonwealth of Australia Canberra 1999; see also W Kelty Developing Australia: a regional perspective Report of the Kelty Task Force on Regional Development Commonwealth of Australia Canberra 1993.
2. B Galligan A Federal Republic: Australia’s Constitutional System of Government Cambridge University Press New York 1995.
3. H Irving (ed) The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation Cambridge University Press Melbourne 1999.
4. H Parkes Fifty Years in the Making of Australian History Longmans Green and Company London 1892, 609-610.
5. H Irving (ed) The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation Cambridge University Press Melbourne 1999, 472.
6. Constitutional Centenary Foundation Federalism Forum: Communiqué Old Parliament House Canberra 19-20 October 2000, 2.
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