Australia is not Britain or England. Acting and legislating as though we were had consistently led o disaster. Rivers are just one example. Until recently Australian courts assumed our rivers were well-behaved English rivers with stable banks, no floods and a permanent year-round flow. That’s why the our rives are so drastically over-allocated and so far there’s very little sign that ‘All powers to the Commonwealth’ is going to change that.

I’d find Clive’s point more persuasive if he turned his nation-doubting gaze to Britain itself, where the Celtic fringe is demanding and getting self-government precisely because ‘All power to London’ has always worked as badly as ‘All power to Canberra’ would.

Many thanks for the kind words. However, I’m not sure I find your analogy/metaphor of Australia as a dispersed city rather than a nation to be very helpful (or even accurate). OTO perhaps it’s because you haven’t yet developed or explained what you meant to any great extent. For me your analogy evokes images of the governance of an ancient city-state like Athens. Australia is a huge, sparsely populated country with large regional differences in stages of development, population density, climate and even ethnic and racial mix (the NT, for example, has a 30% indigenous component to its population where in most of the rest of the country it’s 1% or less).

Those differences are much more marked than those between the citzens of ancient Athens. Moreover, the remoteness of the Canberra governors from the more far-flung parts of the country creates a probability that they will often neither understand nor be responsive to local needs and wishes (in contrast to the immediacy and responsiveness of Athenian democracy). You ascribe the problems described in this post to “parochialism”. While not denying that parochial atitudes exist in Darwin, I would suggest that the problems described here are consequences of remote, unresponsive, arrrogant centralism.

I think the principle of “subsidiarity”, both in its socio-religious and political context, is applicable. A federal structure, especially in a sparsely populated, far flunh country like Australia with different reigons at different stages of economic and social development, provides the best assurance that government will be responsive and accountable to the needs and wishes of the people.

Lastly, I suspect that the “4th Australia” to which you refer is simply another way of describing universal human characteristics: we are tribal creatures who seek power and dominance, and to exclude the “other” while seeking esteem and acceptance from the members of our own tribe. Those characteristics are in no sense unique to Australians (indigenous or otherwise). Liberal democratic constitutionalism, with its insistence on checks and balances (including federalism) is the most effective accommodation human society has so far found which constrains those characteristics in a way that preserves social order and stability and maximises the space for diversity, creativity and individual choice. We may aspire to the stars but our feet remain in the mud, and a workable system of governance needs to accommodate both aspiration and earthly reality.

As Lord Acton put it, “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. There’s nothing about modern Australia that renders his observation inapplicable. I’m certainly open to arguments that there are better ways of ordering our society, but I’m an instinctive conservative at least to the extent that I think the burden of proof lies strongly on those who advocate a radically different system (whatever it might be). I suspect that any attempt to synthesise some sort of new constitutional/governance order based on the sorts of high flown abstractions you outline (which I assume to be partly your project) would be doomed to failure. Nevertheless, I’m certainly interested in seeing where you take these ideas in future posts or comments.

OTO if all you’re saying is that we would be well advised to focus more on the things that unite Australians rather than those that divide us, I agree, and I also agree that Howardian governance has relied on divide-and-rule tactics to an extent that is socially unhealthy. But I don’t think that says anything at all about whether we should opt for a federal or unitary system of governance, or some other model that you might have in mind but haven’t yet explained.

Having lived for 15 years in Brisbane (though not there now), I am also well acquainted with the parochialisms of the golden triangle and their stultifying effects - and think them every bit as regressive as you depict.

Nevertheless, I completely disagree with your conclusion. If the problem is excessive parochialism, and I think it is, then Federation however construed offers us merely more of the same, not less. I think we need to think beyond reshuffling the way we are governed in Australia to consider what it is governed, that is, what ‘Australia’ itself is.

As I started to suggest in the anonymous piece Nick kindly put up, I want to consider the possibility that we in Australia are not a nation at all - and that the realisation of this fact will work to unlock our collective creativity and help us envision a new and I think must better, and completely un-mediocre place for all of us.

Obviously I can’t argue this claim in a single post - and do your excellent material justice.

But here are some quick thoughts. For me, our continent has afforded 3 really remarkable things: the land itself and the bush; an indigenous human culture which is both profound and utterly distinctive in its connections with the first and with itself; and a place where refugees have found sanctuary and found they could through effort and industry build a life with freedoms, dignity and material prosperity and quality of life undreamed of in their homeland.

But if each of these, none unproblematic, are infact 3 kinds of Australia, then there is a 4th kind. This 4th Australia is the one that affords the notion of Australia as a nation, and makes possible the logic of Federation or centralisation or what have you - yet it solves nothing. Whilst offering us ‘Australia’, it undermines and destroys our capacity to be anything like the Australians we are supposed to be - free, joyful, embracing of difference, celebratory,open to the world, etc. Determined by the perculiarly English contradictions of puritanism vs political conservatism, practical thinking vs meglomania, bureaucratic monumentalism vs rabid individualism, the 4th Australia makes ‘Australia’ both possible and impossible all at the same time.

My contention is, therefore, that the parochialism your post described is not the result of the centralism that Federation can save us from (perhaps), but the result of contradictions in our Anglo heritage. And against these, and at a time when Howardism, an arch contemporary example of the 4th Australia, appears to be in decline, I think we need to explicitly reexamine so as to turn to the creativity locked up in our strengths - the 3 remarkable things I referred to above.

My great fear is that Australians have not understood why they time and again reject the 3rd Australia (from Tampa to Keating), have practiced systematic abuse and calumny against the 2nd, and largely treat the 1st as a kitsch confection to either be offered as a diversion we do not understand ourselves to a world bemused by our attitude, or parcelled up and sold off as so much trash to interests abroad who unaccountably find it to have such incredible value, etc. Notwithstanding almost 12 years of the palpable aridity of Howardism, I fear we still have not learned to free ourselves from the self-limiting forces of the 4th Australia.

Why do so many people hold that viewpoint, anyway? That’s something I’ve never understood. In Canada (where I was born) there’s no move to abolish the provinces.

Ha ha ha ha. That’s pretty good.

By the way, you have some beautiful capital works in your fair city.

Too true. Western Australians like to bitch about being bossed about by the Commonwealth, but they’ve got no idea how bad it can get.

In particular:

They managed to convince new ALP Minister for the Northern Territory Kep Enderby to exercise his compulsory acquisition powers, again without notice or consultation with locals, and acquire an area of 32 square miles extending south from the edge of Berrimah and taking in the whole of the present satellite city of Palmerston and the Robertson Barracks military complex.

My parents were diddled out of a bush block they had already spent a lot of time and money improving. Paid a pittance because the acquisition was made in respect of a Territory under a wartime act.

After Tracy my Dad kept away marauding beer-beggars by putting up a sign in front of his property saying “Temperance Union (NT Branch)” out front.

Have you ever had the pleasure of dealing with the City Ranger’s Office ?