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Now is the spring of our mild content : Comments
By Greg Craven, published 9/8/2012The survival of Australian federalism should be a potent constitutional and political force
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Every country in the world with more than 10 million people and every country of more than 500,000 square kilometres has at least three tiers of government.
Even citizens of the oft-quoted United Kingdom have four (or, in some parts of the country, five) levels of government – the European Parliament, the UK Parliament, regional assemblies (elected in the case of Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Greater London) and unitary local authorities or, in some places, both county councils and district councils.
There are functions of government best performed with a certain population size. Some of these are too large to be taken on by local councils but do not need the whole nation to manage them. These functions would exist irrespective of the number of tiers of government and would cause divisions and subdivisions in a national bureaucracy to be created to manage them. Looking after parks and gardens and recreation centres is best done at the local level, but municipalities are too small to run a health system. Running hospitals is best done at the level of the states, but they are too small to have their own armies.
If the states were abolished, thus making Australia unique among the world’s large countries, the bureaucracy would remain the same size, and the levels of decision-making would remain the same. The only difference would be the people would not get to elect those who made the decisions at the intermediate level.