The Australian Government’s “White Paper on Reform of the Federation” and the Future of Australian Local Government

ABSTRACT

The Abbott Government announced its White Paper review of the Australian Federation on June 28, 2014. Set against this backdrop, discussions of the future of Australian local government may provoke an assumption that its role will be cruelled. However, reflection suggests that such an assumption is misplaced. In particular, when the complexities of regionalism in Australia are considered, the potential role of local government begs revisiting. We argue that local government ought to adopt a forthright position in the current debate, particularly with respect to financial reform.

KEYWORDS:

• Australian constitution
• future of local government
• intergovernmental relations

Notes

¹ The Abbott Government also announced a “White Paper on Reform of Australia’s Tax System” on June 28, 2014. For reasons of brevity the discussion here is limited to a consideration of the White Paper on Reform of the Federation.” The Abbott Government had previously announced the “Northern Australia White Paper” on February 28, 2014. The “Green Paper on Developing Northern Australia” was released June 10, 2014 (Australian Government, 2014).

² The authors acknowledge their thanks to an anonymous reviewer of the original paper for suggesting that we emphasize the situationally contingent nature of party-political support for Australian local government in the article.

³ The principle of subsidiarity is not an absolute one with respect to the “pushing down” of authority; rather it is a “movable feast” hinging upon the idea of feasibility. Young (1986, p. 18) stated: But fiscal federalism is often misunderstood as an argument for keeping local government local. All it actually offers is a means of identifying what is, on efficiency grounds, the smallest feasible scale of provision. It is entirely compatible with centralised responsibility and decentralised administration.

⁴ Arguably, there is a more profound tension here, namely between an overtly simplistic federal model on the one hand and what Podger and Brown (cited in SSC 2011, p. 111) described as “ad hoc and messy regionalism” on the other hand.