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.
Reforming Australian governance: Old states, no states, or new states?
There is nothing surprising in this, since federalism is supposed to be a dynamic form of government. We see such dynamism also in the international scene. Not so long ago, Belgium moved from being a unitary to a federal country to accommodate cultural and linguistic differences. Great Britain established new regional assemblies in Scotland and Wales and devolved some central powers to them. Italy and Spain have experienced a resurgence of regionalism driven by cultural and economic forces, and the European Union itself has ignited the aspirations of regions within its member states with its generous subsidies and grants channelled directly for sub-national regions, occurring at the same time as the implementation of its general policies on subsidiarity and mutual recognition of laws. Canada fairly recently (1999) created a new self-governing territory – Nunavut – for its Inuit peoples. Countries in conflict and post-conflict situations have often turned to federalism principles as a way of combining local identity with unity, such as solutions proposed for Cyprus, Jerusalem and Kosovo. Even strong growth economies with unitary systems of government, like Japan, China, Thailand and Indonesia, experience regional tensions as they grow, and look to federal finance arrangements to address their need to share wealth creation between urban and rural or coastal regions, and to achieve a fair balance in tax and expenditure sharing between central and regional governments.
An Analytical Evaluation of New Models of Local Government Service Provision in Regional New South Wales
Intense financial pressure and threats of dissolution through amalgamation in local government structural reform programs have forced regional and rural councils across Australia to consider new organizational arrangements for service delivery. As a consequence, an ingenious array of institutional models has been developed and implemented over the recent past. However, the very spontaneity that has engendered this remarkable process has meant that it has occurred across non-metropolitan Australia often with councils or groups of councils arriving at similar solutions to common problems in ignorance of the efforts of other local authorities. This paper seeks to place selected new models of municipal service delivery in New South Wales in the analytical context of the taxonomy of alternative generic models advanced by Dollery and Johnson (2005) and then assess their main characteristics.