Jeremy Moon and Campbell Sharman, Eds. - Australian Government and Politics

Jeremy Moon and Campbell Sharman, Eds.

Australian Government and Politics: The Commonwealth, The States and the Territories.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003,

pp. xiv + 322, ISBN 0-521-82507-5 hardback, 0-521-53205-1, paperback.

If Nature abhors a vacuum, then surely the science of politics should overwhelm a federation. Sovereignty may be theoretically divisible, but it is impossible to believe in the constant and precise equality of power between centre and periphery necessary to maintain a true federal equilibrium. Indeed, three of the world's most enduring federations, the American, Australian and Swiss examples, all began in times when the outside world could be kept at arm's length, so that the central power could be deliberately emasculated. The Australian Commonwealth, remark the editors, was 'born of compromise and reared on opportunism'. The growth of an external affairs dimension, which barely existed in 1901, has formed an important element in the shift towards centralisation of effective power. In 1983, the Australian government pushed its foreign affairs powers to the length of preventing the Tasmanian government from building a controversial dam - but the island state has retaliated by quarantining Canadian salmon. After a century of federation, Australians are governed through a diverse assortment of parliamentary regimes - Canberra, six states and two territories - prompting the editors of this book to ask whether the continent has one political system or nine.

In the aftermath of the centennial, this collection of eleven thoughtful essays offers a timely review of Australian politics. First, a grumble. Contributors should begin with a note on population. Thus on Western Australia, the editors themselves helpfully indicate that they are talking about two million people, two-thirds of whom live within sixty miles of Perth. By contrast, we learn that Tasmania faces the loss of half its people in the next half century, but it is not until eighteen pages later that we are told that the island only has 470,000 of them to start with.

Australian academics accord to the Labor Party what in computers is called the default position. Moon and Sharman defend this emphasis on the conventional grounds that Labor pioneered mass membership and caucus control, forcing their opponents ('anti-Labor') to follow suit. Moreover, for long periods Labor has been the largest single vote-winning party. There is both paradox and myopia in this view. First, how was it that the Australian Commonwealth was designed without mass parties in mind at all? Here the population factor becomes important. Even today, the average ratio of voters to parliamentarians is 1:2250, small enough for politicians to maintain support through informal networks. Labor's structures make it is easier to study, but the mere fact that the party had to organise thus was as much a sign of weakness as of strength. Moreover, while Labor may have been the largest single party, much good did this do it in pursuing power. The editors argue that for seventy years after 1910, that is, in response to the irruption of Labor, Australian politics was characterised by conservative stability. Indeed, Canberra has only become a two-horse race since 1983 when the party substantially re-branded itself. To argue that Labor was 'unlucky' to lose so often is inadequate. The truth is that the 'anti-Labor' parties generally formed a coherent alliance and were more successful in winning majority support. These essays usefully demonstrate how the Country Party functioned as the right wing's rural safety valve, its variable strength across Australia providing much of the diversity that distinguishes the internal politics of the states. Sure, the coalition parties often disagreed, but open squabbles could be healed. When Labor quarrelled in the 1950s, the outcome was a split, indeed The Split, that left wounds for decades.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Australian democracy is that it accords unquestioning legitimacy to structures that hamper majority rule. The rules for voting have been altered time and again: compulsory voting favours Labor, obligatory listing of all candidates on the ballot helps the right-wing parties. Representation is still sometimes weighted to rural areas, penalising the urban strength of Labor, except in Western Australia, where the mining seats also benefited. Most surprising of all is the barely questioned entrenchment of the upper houses. At Commonwealth level, the Senate survived unscathed the crisis of 1975, although state governments can no longer change its political complexion when filling casual vacancies. The state Legislative Councils have pioneered the committee investigations that have so strengthened the work of all parliaments in recent years, part of Australia's hybrid 'Washminster' system. Few state assemblies number as many as 100 parliamentarians, so that a disproportionate number of the majority party will hold ministerial posts, hampering the scope for an active lower house committee system. Queensland, which scrapped its Council, and the Northern Territory, which does not have one, are not regarded as the most vigorous legislatures in the country.

Behind all this stands the conservatism of the Australian electorate. That most democratic of all devices, the referendum, actually helps to fend off change: only eight of the 44 proposals to amend the Commonwealth constitution since 1901 have succeeded. New South Wales voters are keener to make changes, but the Northern Territory voted against statehood in 2002. Australia prides itself on being one of the first countries to allow women to vote. But it was 1921 before a woman was elected, and 1990 before one formed a government, both in Western Australia. Not until 2001 did a woman lead an opposition into government when Labor's Clare Martin was 'stunned' by her success in the peripheral Northern Territory. Compulsory participation underpins continuity, and so democracy pays at the price of its own success. Elsewhere, Australians may not get the governments they deserve but they certainly seem to get the politics they want. It may not be only Tasmania that desperately needs creative vision but must rub along with opportunism and brokerage. In middle-class Canberra, the infant Australian Capital Territory executive experiments with relaxing cabinet solidarity, but is it symbolic that the ACT's most radical notion has been the attempted legalisation of euthanasia?

Even though each state is different, outsiders will be struck by the homogeneity of Australian politics. We hear in passing of a rogue legislator who called himself 'South Australia First' and of tiny local parties trying to break into the fissiparous legislatures of Hobart and Darwin. But, unlike Canada, Australia has no secessionist movements and its coast-to-coast party system is remarkably uniform. One system or nine? Moon and Sharman tackled the question with some advanced mathematics, and their answer is: yes and no. It seems an appropriately federal response.