Regionalism - A Cure for Federal Ills?
When criticism is made of the operation of the federal system in Australia, the answer often proposed is 'regionalism'. Sometimes what is meant is the introduction of a fourth tier of regional governments, but more often what is proposed is the abolition of State and local governments and the creation instead of a two-tiered system of national and regional governments. A third alternative that has been raised is the creation of a number of new States so that each region becomes a State, as this may be constitutionally easier to achieve than the abolition of the existing states. This article examines these various proposals, assessing whether they are likely to achieve their purported aims and raising the many practical problems that would arise if they were to be implemented. It ends by noting the difficulty in assessing regionalism proposals due to their lack of clarity and detail and concludes that the case for regionalism as an alternative to federalism or as a means of reforming it has not yet been made out.
A Tale of Two Regionalisms: Improving the Measurement of Regionalism in Australia and Beyond
Brown A. J. and Deem J. A tale of two regionalisms: improving the measurement of regionalism in Australia and beyond, Regional Studies. Studies of regional identification are integral to the role of regionalism in political development, but how does one study regionalism when subnational political scales and regional political culture may be out of alignment? This question is tackled using Australia, a federation theorized as having possibly hit a regionalization ‘ceiling effect’, but which empirical study using a moderate relational approach shows to have not one regionalism but two within its political culture: formal ‘state-regionalism’ reflected in its federal system and a more organic ‘region-regionalism’ only thinly reflected in political structure, albeit apparently still consistent with federalism. Both are identified as politically salient and reflected in institutional preferences, but as also reinforcing debates that regionalization from a devolutionary perspective is far from complete, as manifested in citizen support for new regional government. The results better inform reform debates and provide departure points for research.
Left on the Shelf: Local Government and the Australian Constitution
When the Australian Constitution was first written, those framing it did not includespecific reference to local government. The authors have examined the federationconventions, papers and formal discussions of the 1890s and noted the little prominencegiven to the case for including local government in the Australian Constitution. It appearsthat the leaders of the federation movement did not deliberately exclude local government;rather, there was little pressure to include local agendas and concerns, and few werewilling to champion the case for the inclusion of local government.Chris Aulich Rebecca PietschUniversity of Canberra University of CanberraPrior to federation, each of the Australiancolonies had enacted legislation to provideboth legitimacy for local government and aframework for its operations. When theAustralian Constitution was written, thoseframing it did not include specific reference tolocal government and, by default, defined localgovernment essentially as a state statutoryauthority, although some states did providefirmer guarantees for the continuation of localgovernment through formal inclusion withintheir own constitutions. In effect, localgovernment was ‘left on the shelf’ by beingdenied a place in the new national polity.It has been clear that local government hasbeen ‘kept in check’ by these state and territoriallocal government Acts, which have, even aftertheir reform in the 1990s, placed limitations onthe scope of local government activities andservices (Aulich 1999:1). It is hardly surprising,then, to find that local government in Australiahas a limited range of local governmentfunctions compared with most OECD countries.According to a 1991 survey of local govern-ment systems in 20 Western countries, theexclusion of local government from thenational constitution places Australia in a smallgroup of countries, an ‘Anglo variant’ of localgovernment systems, which show a relative lackof enthusiasm for local democracy and wherethe health of the local authorities is in a moreprecarious state than in other Western polities(Marshall 1998:644). It is this situation thatprompted efforts in the 1980s to seek constitu-tional recognition for local government.This paper is the first of two that examinethe relationship between Commonwealth andlocal government in the Australian federation.