REFORMING GOVERNMENT IN AUSTRALIA (essay)

A striking feature of Paul Sheehan's best selling book, Amongst the Barbarians, is that it is almost totally negative. It contains attacks on many groups, races and categories of people, but there are no positive proposals at all to address perceived problems, except the entirely abstract and rhetorical proposition that Australia should become an "ecological superpower", whatever that means.

Much the same applies to the Pauline Hanson political movement. All its proposals are entirely negative — such things as increasing penalties for certain crimes, keeping out migrants and cutting expenditures on everybody from unwed mothers to Aboriginals.

Yet Australians are crying out for practical answers to a multitude of problems. One area in which there is an obvious crisis is the machinery of Australian government. Over the past couple of years we have seen an inconclusive Constitutional Convention discussing whether we should remain legally and constitutionally a British colony or become a republic, this was followed by the recent referendum in which the flawed model produced by the Constitutional Convention was defeated narrowly on the basis of very effective demagogic rhetoric by the monarchist side about the need for direct election of a president.

We have seen the Australian Capital Territory given an awkward kind of limited self government, and many thousands of electors in the territory voting for a No-Self-Government Party.

We have seen the parliament in Tasmania dramatically change the electoral system. We have seen the Kennett Government in Victoria close down local government, amalgamate many municipalities and then restore local government in much bigger areas, but with the undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system.

We have now just seen the Howard government, in a piece of hopeful electoral opportunism, float an ill-thought-out proposition for immediate statehood for the Northern Territory without resolving the problem of federal and state division over Aboriginal land rights, or of the very small population base of the new state (much less than half of the population of Tasmania, and half the population of the ACT), or the problem of the number of Senate seats for the new state.

In a rather surprising, but heartening turn-up, the Northern Territory electorate threw out this undemocratic proposal in a referendum coinciding with the federal elections, and coincidentally threw out the Liberal member for the Northern Territory and replaced him with a Labor member.

Positive proposals needed

These things highlight the need for a serious investigation of the problems of Australian government and realistic proposals for how they might be resolved. If it's worth writing about the problems of Australian society, politics and government, as Paul Sheehan, Bob Gould and others do, it's for such would-be public intellectuals should put forward concrete proposals to resolve some of these problems.

In this spirit, therefore, after the better part of a lifetime in political activity, I advance for public discussion a set of proposals to resolve some of the problems of Australian government, in the current millenarian atmosphere.

A good place to start this discussion is with a little polemical book of 109 pages published recently by Rodney Hall, a prominent Australian poet who was, for three years, chairman of the Australia Council.

Hall's book is called Abolish the States and is a vigorously presented argument for the abolition of both state governments and local municipal councils, replacing both with just one system of regional government. Hall claims this rearrangement would save many millions of dollars.

Just recently, prominent left-wing Labor federal front bencher Lindsay Tanner has also promoted the abolition of the states in his new book, Open Australia. It's worth pointing out about Tanner that he is sketching out a proposed new Labor policy in which he jettisons most of the traditional socialist propositions in favour of a number of rhetorical, general propositions that are hard to pin down to concrete government actions.

In my view, Tanner throws in the abolition of the states lightly, as a kind of left face to soften the impact of his general shift to the right. He is anything but stupid, and he must therefore realise that the abolition of the states is a proposition that's unlikely to be taken up by any Labor leadership as immediate practical politics. Therefore, I believe, this proposal is really left talk, thrown in rather cynically without any serious intention that it will ever become reality.

When I commenced my activity in the labour movement in the 1950s, support for abolishing the states was common in the labour movement and, without thinking about it much, I shared it myself. I've come around to the view that it's a mistaken solution to obvious problems, and I now have a different approach.

I would now oppose abolishing the States and local government and replacing three tiers of government by two, for the following reasons.

Objections to centralisation

 

Reason One: The Commonwealth government is extremely remote. It's very hard to get at. It has many useful functions, but it's actually the arm of government most insulated from popular pressure. State and local governments are much less far away. If you look at Australian history since Federation, a big part of the real political life of the community continues to be expressed in the state parliaments and in local government. It's easier to get at politicians the closer you are to them, and the more directly the political structure relies on your vote. The idea of only having regional governments of a million or so population, combined with one big national bureaucracy in Canberra, terrifies me. ............