t 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.
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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. How would you ever get close enough to your representatives to influence them at all in a political system like that?
Reason Two: The states arose in Australia from the original colonies for real geographical reasons. Distances between major regions in Australia are enormous. Anyone who has read the seminal works by Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs about the development of cities and the interaction between cities and their hinterlands in the evolution of civilisation, will appreciate the problems of government structure in a thinly settled country such as Australia. The Australian the colonies, and then the states, evolved around major port cities and their hinterlands, and the scope for real regions separated from major port cities in Australia is extremely limited. All Australian history underlines this. All the existing states evolved from central cities and their hinterlands and a real examination of Australian geography fairly quickly throws up real limiting factors on regional development, other than regional development focused on major ports.
If regional development is considered concretely, within the above framework, a critical and careful appraisal of the haphazard path of the development of states and regions, over the past 100 years, throws up the possibility of major improvements to the regional structure of the existing states, and the creation of several real new states, which is about the total of real regionalisation that is possible in Australia without vastly increasing the cost of government, or, on the other hand, creating such a centralised bureaucracy that ordinary people will never have any chance of influencing its decisions, let alone removing the people in power.
Specific proposals for regionalising the states
This proposal starts with a careful reorganisation of existing state boundaries, combined with the creation of four new states, including two new states incorporating New Zealand, to take into account real geographical, climatic and population realities, a number of which have, in fact, only become obvious since Federation.
Capricornia. The first of the 10 states would be a new state called Capricornia, the name taken from Xavier Herbert's wonderful book about life in northern Australia. The state boundary would start at the bottom of the Eighty Mile Beach in Western Austalia, go across the top, so to speak, between Barrow Creek and Tennant Creek, then from a spot near Hatchers Creek, go down the Hay River to a point near the existing corner between South Australia and Queensland, then up to a line just north of Longreach, Aramac and Blair Athol, to the coast south of Mackay, and then out to sea, taking in the bottom of the end of the Barrier Reef and Cato Island. p> The population of this area would be approximately 800,000, which is a good figure for a state to be viable. State capital functions could be divided between Darwin and Townsville, with perhaps the legislature in Darwin. This new state would satisfy the long-standing desire of the population of the Kimberleys, the northern part of the Territory and north Queensland, for their own state.
This kind of proposal was first made by Jock Nelson Jnr, at that time, the Labor member of Federal Parliament for the Northern Territory, at a conference of the the Australian Institute of Political Science on Northern Australia in the 1950s. p> At this conference, Nelson pointed out that the attachment of Central Australia to the Northern Territory was a historical accident, and was not originally meant to be permanent, and that the real ties of the Centre were with South Australia, a circumstance that still prevails now.
Nelson actually proposed two states in the northern region I've outlined, but I would propose one for r...
