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Victor Harrison's avatar

What about an argument for a unitary state that rests on the convenience of changing the distribution of responsibilities between levels of government? At the moment, a challenge we have is that if we wanted to confer a certain government responsibility on the Commonwealth that sits beyond the powers enumerated in s 51, we have to go through a difficult and fractious referendum process.

Under a unitary system, we could maintain devolution of powers, but if we were to decide, for example, that school resourcing across the country should be needs-based and follow a uniform rule, the central government could simply shift where the responsibility was located rather than have to navigate hard constitutional limits.

That seems to support conscious subsidiarity, rather than relying on hard subsidiarity set practically in stone in 1901 (given our experience of referenda). Why not retain the States but allow a more conscious and active distribution of responsibilities? Why settle for 'it ain't (too) broke, so don't fix it' in terms of the current somewhat arbitrary and antiquated division of powers?

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Paul Norton's avatar

A key premise of the argument in the post is that the Australian State capital cities/conurbations exist, are not going away, and are going to retain their demographic, economic and political weight within the Australian polity. I think this is completely correct. This then raises the question of the extent to which advocates of replacing the states with regional governments are also romantic advocates of demographic decentralisation and de-urbanisation.

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