In the "Great Mistakes of Australian History" Clive Moore tackles the problem of federation and its choice in 1901. Moore argues that the constitutional process in the 19thC failed to engage with the Pacific and Asia, as well as made the constitution impervious to change. His final point is that political expediency and compromise between the colonies to get them to agree to federation has meant that the colonial boundaries are for ever cast in stone as states.

The first point was probably not socially possible. The 19thC had 'scientifically' convinced itself of the superiority of the white and Briton race. The fortress mentality that led to the White Australia policy was agreed upon by all sides of Australian politics.

It is an immoral chapter in Australian governmental and administrative history but was popular enough that it could not have been stopped. It was not a result of the constitution, as another article in the book notes, Darwin was setup to be a multi-ethnic Hong Kongese style trading centre, but hardening racial opinion never enabled it to achieve that in the late 19thC and early 20thC.

The other persistent myth, which Felix challenged, and has now been empirically determined to be false, is that the Australian Constitution is hard to change. The referendum is structured in a way to satisfy both the national and federal character. For instance:

• Majority in Senate - federal character
• Majority in House - national character
• Majority of popular vote - national character
• Majority of states (ie majority of popular vote in a majority of states) - federal character

This is a federation design choice. The majority of states may seem like an extra step too many, and I think it is, however, despite Australia's small number of states, it has not affected an outcome of a referendum. If a referendum has passed the popular vote, in all cases that I can recall it has all passed the state majority as well.

The high failure rate of Australian referendums has been because of the large number of referndums put forward that were for the increase of Commonwealth power. When the referendums are divided in this manner it becomes obvious that Australian voters were rejecting centralisation.

Moore notes that Canberra has found different ways to get around this:

This has been partially overcome by the occasional (though rare) successful referenda, and the use of the High Court to extend the federal government powers in a way never contemplated by the authors of the Constitution.

The latter is a significant issue. As can be seen by the following chart, the referendums for centralisation dropped off in volume in the second half of the twentieth century as the High Court's decisions and support for centralisation in Canberra has made referendums less necessary for Canberra to achieve the power it wants.

Moore's third complaint, that the states are forever fixed in geopolitical shape by the constitution is a good one. The value of a constitution is that it provides inter-generational stability and certainty of government. It removes the disruption of coups, violence for political power, or warfare between competing political domestic powers. The downside is that it is inherently inflexible by design.

This raises questions of balancing stability and fluidity. Normally when we talk of these areas we consider the stable technology to be constitutionalism while fluidity is provided by statutory legislation.

It is hard to give a national government statutory control over the States as complete centralisation would be a quick process rather than one that has been eroded over a century. The State control over Local Government carries similar pitfalls.

Yet if we look at Local Government it has remained fairly volatile as to its borders as administrative growth demands. For instance the Brisbane City Council and Penrith City Council were both created by the coalesence of several smaller municipal councils. I don't think anyone would doubt that the growing administrative challenges of those two cities made those amalgamations wide.

They are examples of a centralisation process. Not unlike the Federal Government's encroachment into the States. One of the purposes of Federation is to have powerful decentralised political entities that can rival the national government for power. This keeps overt centralisation, and the propensity for central tyranny and inefficiency in check.

Moore writes:

I am not advocating abolishing the states, having one national government and preserving all of the several hundred (629) local government units.

However, there are clearly regions within Australia that would work well as provincial government units. To name just a few: Wimmera, the Pilbara, Western NSW, New England (a referendum on the New England statehood was narrowly defeated in 1967), Queensland's South-East corner, the Darling Downs, the Cental Queensland coal-basin and Cape York would all function much better under their own regional governments.

In this area Moore is arguing for what Russell Trood called 'regionalism' in his Senate speech. This is a devolution of the states as administrative areas while maintaining their constitutional status in the federal constitution as states.

This minor form of devolution would still leave fairly powerful state bodies. Moore notes that the Brisbane City Council [BCC] has a similar budget to Tasmania and it is implied in Moore's article that he sees the provinces in being something of the BCC's size. He concludes with:

The ideal new government system would have a national government and around 30 provinces, designed for efficient regional operation, with a constitution capable of beind amended as circumstances change.

Moore's idea is not new either. The Prime Minister, John Howard, has remarked on radio:

"If we were starting Australia all over again, I wouldn't support having the existing state structure," he said. "I would actually support having a national government, and perhaps a series of regional governments having the power of, say, the Brisbane City Council.

"But we're not starting Australia all over again, and the idea of abolishing state governments is unrealistic."

Again the BCC is popping up, but it is the exception in Australia and it coincides with the seat of Queensland power - state parliament is in Brisbane as well. The main problems between the national and state governments are fiscal. Namely the vertical fiscal imbalance. This has been used to leverage all manner of control over the states, from the tied grants to the GST, the state's have had their independent fiscal footing removed from them.

John Gorton's and Gough Whitlam's view of federation was that the federal government made policy, funded that policy and the states existed as regional administrative units for the disbursement of federal funds in support of federal policy. This removes all capability of regional or provincial policy making from the states.

So the problem goes far deeper than the geographic boundaries of the states. Whenever these issues are discussed the problem becomes centralisation and Canberra's rapacious desire to be unitary rather than federal.

Incession and secession are already possible in the Australian constitution. The Northern Territory has had a referendum on statehood, while Western Australia has already seceded once and as Moore noted New England in NSW nearly has too. These vehicles exist but have either not been acted upon or not been successful.

The BCC sized provinces are largely national dreaming for a more controllable systems of states from Canberra's point of view. One of the problems with the increasing centralisation is that even the very powerful states, such as NSW and Western Australia, are unable to stop the encroachment of federal government.

In such an environment it makes sense for the subsidiary units to be bigger in order to stand against the larger entity. If the present large states such as NSW and Western Australia were to break up into smaller provinces, the federal government would dominate them politically in short order. We would have a unitary system of government very quickly.

It may be that in our present environment of increasing national power that a couple of the states need to join in order to become stronger against the central entity - maybe NSW and Victoria need to amalgamate in order to stave off federal encroachment. Maybe Tasmania and Victoria need to create a super-state?

I can see where there needs to be incession and devolution of the present state system for administrative purposes, but in the current environment of rampant centralisation, I fail to see how it makes sense. The mechanisms to incede and secede already exist but have only been acted upon in rare cases. As it is they need to be done under the legitimacy of the popular will anyway.

I don't consider the choice of federalism as the guiding a technology an error, nor do I consider the current geo-political boundaries of the states a historical error though I do recognise the fluidity from incession and secession as important for the political and administrative challenges facing regions.

cam