A federal structure allows people to compare different political systems operating in the same country and to act on those comparisons by voting with their feet. This process of comparison, choice and exit has occurred on a massive scale in Australia, especially in the eighties and early nineties.
During those years Australians moved in huge numbers from the then heavily governed southern states to the then wide-open spaces of Queensland. So a federal constitution operates as a check on the ability of state and territory governments to exploit or oppress their citizens, and the special merit of the right of exit is that it is a self-help remedy—simple, cheap and effective.
The second advantage one could call the possibility of experiment. In the British constitutional scholar James Bryce, later Viscount Bryce, published a monumental study of the United States political system, and that book, The American Commonwealth , became the standard reference work at Australia's federal conventions. So it is a valuable guide to the understanding and intentions of Australia's founders.
In other words, the autonomy of the states allows the nearest thing to a controlled experiment that you can have in the sphere of law making. And being closer to the workface, state governments are in a better position than a national government to assess the costs as well as the benefits of particular policies, as revealed in that way.
Not only that, but the possibility of competition among the states creates incentives for each one to experiment with ways of providing the best combination of public goods that will possibly attract people and resources from other states. Take for example the question of de facto relationships. They have recently attracted the attention of lawmakers because they exist today on a scale that is unprecedented in our history.
Well, the only way to know is to see what happens in practice and compare the results. Besides making this kind of experiment possible, a federal system makes it harder for governments to dismiss evidence that undermines their favoured approach, because the results of experience in one's own country are much harder to ignore than evidence from foreign lands.
And that's one reason why lobby groups and ideologues and activists of all stripes tend to be rather hostile to federalism. Hardly a week passes without some lobby group lamenting the different approaches taken by state laws to current social or economic issues, and calling for uniform national legislation to deal with the problem.
Well, behind these calls for uniformity, one can usually find a desire to impose one solution on the whole country, precisely so that evidence about the effectiveness of other approaches in Australian conditions will not become available, because unless experimentation can be suppressed, the lobbyists cannot isolate their theory from confrontation with conflicting evidence.
In any event, when you look more closely at a lot of proposals for uniform legislation, the uniformity itself turns out to be an illusion. An example is the Federal Evidence Act of , which was meant to be re-enacted by all the states.
It does it by giving the trial judge a complete discretion as to whether to admit the evidence or not. Justice Einstein of the New South Wales Court of Appeal says that the exercise of these discretions is not normally reviewable on appeal.
In other words, what the trial judge says, goes. So what you get is a substantial extension of the powers of individual trial judges in this fundamental question of admissibility, which often decides the outcome of a case. So instead of six different state laws and two territory laws capable of affecting the outcome of a case, we now in effect have as many different evidence laws as we have trial judges. Of course, neither uniformity nor diversity is an advantage in itself.
Sometimes the gains from nationwide uniformity will clearly outweigh the benefits of independent experimentation. That will usually be the case where there is long experience to draw on, for example in defence arrangements, the official language, railway gauges, currency, bills of exchange, weights and measures, and that sort of thing. But experimentation has special advantages in dealing with new problems presented in a rapidly changing society, or in developing new solutions when the old ones are no longer working.
The third advantage is the accommodation of regional preferences and diversity. A federal constitution gives a country the flexibility to accommodate variations in economic bases, social tastes and attitudes. These characteristics correlate substantially with geography, and state laws in a federation can be adapted to local conditions in a way that is rather hard to do in a national unitary system.
This enables government to become more in harmony with the people's wishes. In addition, this outlet for minority or local views has the effect of strengthening overall national unity. When Wayne Goss was premier of Queensland he was making this point when he warned that abolishing the states, even de facto, could tear the country apart. Even in Australia there are cultural and attitudinal differences between the states. If you doubt that, just look at the way in which the national media characterise Queenslanders or Western Australians, or the condescension you sometimes see in their references to Tasmanians.
Some critics of federalism might acknowledge these differences, but they say that really the only possible justification for a federal system is social or cultural differences, and in Australia they are not marked enough to justify it, and that the state borders are purely arbitrary lines lacking a real social basis.
Professor Sharman says that those propositions are unfounded, and he gives these reasons:. To begin with, a sense of political community can exist quite independently of social differences between communities.
Geographical contiguity, social interaction and a sharing of common problems all tend to create a feeling of community, whether it is a street, a neighbourhood or a state. The chestnut about the arbitrary nature of state boundaries is not only wrong as a geographical observation for many state borders—deserts, Bass Strait and the Murray River are hardly arbitrary lines—but fundamentally misconceives the nature and consequences of boundaries.
Drawing political borders on a featureless plain is an arbitrary act, but once drawn, those lines rapidly acquire social reality. To his list of natural boundaries in Australia, one could add the Queensland border ranges, which mark off the eastern tropical and sub-tropical regions. Also, one could point to the simple factor of the huge distances between the main urban settled areas in Australia, which is probably more marked here than in any other country. Despite the wonders of modern communication, if people are really going to empathise and understand one another they still need to get together and talk face to face.
The argument that Australia is too uniform, too homogeneous, to be a federation also runs into the problem that federalism quite clearly works best when differences between states are not too marked and not too geographically delineated. Multi-ethnic federations are definitely the hardest ones to sustain. For example, there is no state, or group of states, that is overwhelmingly black, or American Indian, or Jewish, or Catholic, or Asian or what have you.
Then you contrast that with Canada, where most of the French-speaking population is concentrated in Quebec, which itself is overwhelmingly French-speaking, and the results are obvious. Similar tensions caused Singapore, which is overwhelmingly Chinese, to secede from the Malaysian federation. So in that light, Australia's relative uniformity from a social and cultural point of view is an argument for, and not against, a federal structure.
The fourth advantage is the greater ability to participate in government and the potential for countering elitism. A federation is inherently more democratic than a unitary system, simply because there are more levels of government for popular opinion to affect. Otherwise the result would be elite rule by a single city, such as London or Paris.
This characteristic of decentralised government makes people in a federation more like active participants than passive recipients. It produces men and women who are citizens, rather than subjects, and gives governments a greater degree of legitimacy. This more democratic aspect of federalism is especially important at a time when elitist theories of government, although dressed up in democratic garb, are once again in vogue. The struggle between government by the people and government by an elite is as a struggle as old as the western political tradition itself.
In fact, political science was founded on that dichotomy, on that struggle, because Plato's The Republic was largely his criticism of democracy as it operated at Athens. In its latest manifestation, the conflict between elitism and democracy has been said to explain modern politics more satisfactorily than the traditional division between left and right.
Elitism has of course been dominant through most of history. The democracy that we know is only two centuries old, a product of the French and American revolutions. When united with the English traditions of liberty and the rule of law, it has produced not only an unprecedented measure of individual freedom, but also a huge and unsurpassed increase in the material well-being of the people.
Still, elitism has never conceded defeat, and in the s we started to see the sprouting of a hybrid of the old Platonic plant, and it is now in a position of dominance among the political class. This is a model that lies somewhere between the poles of democracy and elitism, a model in which the power of an enlightened minority is thought to be necessary to help a democracy to survive and progress.
This new wave of elitism has gained momentum from the trend towards globalisation. Incredibly, Australia supported that initiative at the time, but it ran into the sand eventually, becoming an obsolete proposal with the growth of the Internet and the fax and so on. UNESCO is once again, I notice, looking for other ways to revive that idea, particularly by finding ways of controlling or censoring the Internet.
This is quite an interesting example. Wherever you see these dismissive references to public debate and these attempts to channel or guide or control political comment in the media, you know for sure that you are in the presence of elitism.
It is a sure guide, a favourite—so are identity cards, incidentally, which is something else we had experience of in this country a few years ago. Control of the media is a sure litmus test of elitism. It is interesting, because we have seen it promoted in Australia in recent years from the s onwards.
Elitist politicians since then have repeatedly attempted to instil an elitist version of the doctrine of free speech, under which the government would influence which political issues were debated, and who would debate them. In August-September , the Whitlam government proposed a scheme whereby newspapers would be granted a licence to publish, and this licence would be granted or cancelled by a government body.
The wave of fear that it generated was a material factor in the constitutional crisis of , although you never hear it referred to in media accounts of those events.
The idea was shelved in , but it was taken off the shelf again in with the Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures Act, which prohibited all political advertising—paid or unpaid—on radio or television in the period leading up to an election.
Blocks of free airtime were to be allocated to approved parties, again by a government body. The Act was overturned by the High Court, [24] but supporters of the idea are again looking for other ways of the government influencing and channelling political debate. These ideas, if they succeed, would be very detrimental to Australian democracy. The philosopher William James and many after him have pointed out that in our search for reliable information we are guided by the questions that arise during argument about a given course of action.
It is only through the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. This participatory character of federalism does lead to more abundant political debate at all levels, but critics of federalism don't like that. In that sense, debate and conflict are an inescapable part of civilised life. As Campbell Sharman points out, federalism's more open structure will produce more overt political conflict, but it does this only as a reflection of the increased opportunity for individual and group access to the government process.
Such conflict is clearly highly desirable. Federalism, he explains:. It is nonsense to think that problems would disappear if Australia became a unitary state and there would be few who would argue that the politics of bureaucratic intrigue are preferable to the open cut and thrust of competitive politics in the variety of forums provided by a federal structure. The fifth advantage I want to put before you is that federalism is a protection of liberty.
I mentioned earlier that a federal structure protects citizens from oppression or exploitation on the part of state governments, through the right of exit. But federalism is also a shield against arbitrary central government. The late Geoffrey Sawer of the Australian National University in Canberra was a very distinguished constitutional lawyer. Although he was definitely no friend of federalism, he did have to admit that federalism was, in itself, a protection of individual liberty.
Even in its rather battered condition, Australian federalism has proved its worth in this respect. For example, it was the premiers and other state political leaders who led the struggle against the political broadcasts ban. In fact, the New South Wales government was a plaintiff in the successful High Court challenge to that legislation, and that decision, I would suggest, was the perhaps the greatest advance in Australian political liberty since federation.
The sixth advantage is better supervision of government. Decentralised governments make better decisions than centralised ones, for a number of reasons. Lord Bryce said that in the United States the growth of polity had been aided by the fact that state governments were watched more closely by the people than Congress was. In other words, the British system of colonial self-government, which we had here after —and, in various forms, a little earlier—was to grant the colonies complete self-government in relation to domestic issues, subject to certain exceptions.
That may seem obvious, because we accept that that's the way it happened in Australia and we think that's the only way it could happen. But you should contrast that with the French approach to colonial self-government, which was—and still is—to allow the residents of the colonies to elect members of the National Parliament in Paris, whereas the colonies themselves are governed simply as overseas departments of France itself.
So this idea of local self-government as promoting better supervision is one which has been implemented even by Britain itself.
This closer supervision is a function of lower monitoring costs. There are fewer programs and employees at state levels, and the amounts of tax revenues are smaller. This resulted in that state achieving the highest literacy rate in the country. But it is also important to keep in mind that there are some challenges that federalism cannot resolve.
For example, some members of the same ethnic group might live in more than one region of the country. Or, some parts of the country might have several minority groups within one territory. For those, federalism alone may not offer sufficient protection. These groups may need special minority rights and protections, as well as a strong independent court system to enforce these rights.
Federalism can be expensive because it duplicates government functions at both the central and regional levels. Federalism can also be inefficient and inflexible. For example, it might be more difficult for a federal system to coordinate responses to natural disasters or pandemics. If the different levels of government do not collaborate well it makes it harder for them to deliver on their policy promises.
Some other possibilities include: giving cultural autonomy to particular religious or linguistic minorities. Devolving more power from the centre to local governments, or establishing special autonomy for particular provinces. Nevertheless, in large, or diverse countries where different groups mainly live in different parts of the country, federalism might be a good arrangement and support social cohesion and sustainable peace.
Workshop participants discuss Covid considerations ahead of the elections in Timor-Leste. If municipal transit authorities or fire departments cannot be left to decide such particulars, what, if anything, are local governments for?
Surely, most of the matters in question—putting out a fire, taking a bus ride, disciplining a troublemaker in school, removing hazards like asbestos or lead from a school or a house—rarely spill across jurisdictions and so do not justify intervention by a higher order of government. Before Congress acted to rid the Republic of asbestos, the great majority of states already had programs to find and remove the potentially hazardous substance.
Long before the U. Environmental Protection Agency promulgated expensive new rules to curb lead poisoning, state and municipal code enforcement departments were also working to eliminate this danger to the public health. Why the paternalists in Washington cannot resist dabbling in the quotidian tasks that need to be performed by state and local officials would require a lengthy treatise on bureaucratic behavior, congressional politics, and judicial activism.
Suffice it to say that the propensity, whatever its source, poses at least two fundamental problems. The first is that some state and local governments may become sloppier about fulfilling their basic obligations. The Hurricane Katrina debacle revealed how ill-prepared the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana were for a potent tropical storm that could inundate the region. There were multiple explanations for this error, but one may well have been habitual dependence of state and local officials on direction, and deliverance, by Uncle Sam.
In Louisiana, a state that was receiving more federal aid than any other for Army Corps of Engineers projects, the expectation seemed to be that shoring up the local defenses against floods was chiefly the responsibility of Congress and the Corps, and that if the defenses failed, bureaucrats in the Federal Emergency Management Agency would instantly ride to the rescue.
That assumption proved fatal. Relentlessly pressured to spend money on other local projects, and unable to plan centrally for every possible calamity that might occur somewhere in this huge country, the federal government botched its role in the Katrina crisis every step of the way—the flood prevention, the response, and the recovery.
The local authorities in this tragedy should have known better, and taken greater precautions. Apart from creating confusion and complacency in local communities, a second sort of disorder begot by a national government too immersed in their day-to-day minutia is that it may become less mindful of its own paramount priorities. Consider an obvious one: the security threat presented by Islamic extremism. This should have been the U. The prelude to September 11, was eventful and ominous. Muslim militants had tried to hijack an airliner and crash it into the Eiffel Tower in Courtesy of Al Qaeda, truck bombings at the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in caused thousands of casualties.
And so it went, year after year. What is remarkable was not that the jihadists successfully struck the Twin Towers again in the fall of but that the United States and its allies threw no forceful counterpunches during the preceding decade, and that practically nothing was done to prepare the American people for the epic struggle they would have to wage. Instead, the Clinton administration and both parties in Congress mostly remained engrossed in domestic issues, no matter how picayune or petty.
Neither of the presidential candidates in the election seemed attentive to the fact that the country and the world were menaced by terrorism. On the day of reckoning, when word reached President George W.
Bush that United Airlines flight had slammed into a New York skyscraper, he was busy visiting a second-grade classroom at an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida. The failure was also rooted in a kind of systemic attention deficit disorder. To be sure, the past four years have brought some notable changes.
Controversies of the most local, indeed sub-local, sort—like the case of Terri Schiavo—still make their way to the top, transfixing Congress and even the White House. The sensible way to disencumber the federal government and sharpen its focus is to take federalism seriously—which is to say, desist from fussing with the management of local public schools, municipal staffing practices, sanitation standards, routine criminal justice, family end-of-life disputes, and countless other chores customarily in the ambit of state and local governance.
Engineering such a disengagement on a full scale, however, implies reopening a large and unsettled debate: What are the proper spheres of national and local authority?
In short, the regional governments are dominant over the central government. This type of political system is rare, and tends to be unstable because the lack of a true central authority means it is hard to resolve conflicts between the states, and they may find it hard to resolve coordination and collective action problems.
The flow of political authority in a confederal system is shown in the diagram to the right. The rarity of confederal systems is highlighted by the difficulty in finding clear examples in the world today.
Switzerland is sometimes claimed to be a confederal system because its official title is the Helvetic Confederation, but that name dates back to the 13 th century and since the mid- 19 th century the country has been properly characterized as a federal system. In , following the splintering of Yugoslavia, Serbia and Montenegro formed a confederation, but it lasted only until Probably the only true confederal system in existence today is the European Union EU.
The member states are all still sovereign and independent, the European parliament has only the power delegated to it by those independent member states, and most laws passed by that parliament have to be approved independently in each member country in order to take effect in those countries. But the EU confederation seems as unstable as any other. It faces the same problems of coordination and collective action that seem to characterize and plague confederations, particularly over monetary and economic policies.
There is continuing tension over whether it will remain primarily confederal, or will continue to gradually shift more and more authority to the European Parliament and eventually become a federal system, or although unlikely collapse altogether as member states abandon it.
The United States began as a confederal system. The 13 colonies that declared independence from England saw themselves not as a single country, but as 13 separate new countries united in a confederacy. The Articles of Confederation—the U. The confederal system worked poorly for the newly independent states, at least in the view of influential political leaders, and the Articles of Confederation were soon replaced by the Constitution drafted in and ratified in However when the southern states tried to secede from the U.
Federal political systems. In a federal political system political authority is divided between a central government and regional governments. The key distinguishing factor is that the political authority exercised by the regional governments in the U. The flow of political authority in a federal system is shown in the diagram above to the right.
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