Under a centralising Federal Government

To continue:

The long-run tendency is for the Commonwealth to pre-empt an activity once it has gained a substantial foothold, whatever the original reasons for its entry. The Constitution permits the Commonwealth to enter many fields already occupied by the states; Constitutional amendments have transferred state activities to the Commonwealth without conferring a legal monopoly; the states have voluntarily allowed the Commonwealth to take over some of their activities or to provide substantial grants to them for their activities; the Commonwealth has by-passed the states by providing services direct to the public in traditional state activities.

Closely allied with these developments has been the considerable growth of co-ordinating and advisory committees and conferences with membership drawn from the organisations and interests most affected by Commonwealth aggrandisement and pre-emption …

Co-operative federalism suffers less from the performance of similar functions than from the financial inequality between the Commonwealth and the states … The financial supremacy of the Commonwealth enables its programme to receive priority over state demands. Whereas the states have little control over Commonwealth activities, the Commonwealth makes a thorough examination of state programmes …

In the absence of war and depression, it is possible that the growth of the Commonwealth would not have become so marked.

This latter point was certainly recognised by Menzies and Howard who skilfully used the threats contained within the Cold War and the confected threats of the Terror War to extend the power of the Commonwealth and through adaptive bureaucratic structural arrangements their own hold on power and electoral appeal.

Finally:

More serious may be the distortion of public needs by the Commonwealth’s financial superiority and political manoeuvring, the misallocation of resources through inadequate and superficial co-ordination and co-operation between public authorities and private enterprise, duplication and waste of effort by conflicting or competing authorities, and generally inefficient government administration as a result of concurrency.

The remarkable aspect of this analysis of federal/state relations is not in its acuity but in the fact that it was written 42 years ago by Gerald E. Caiden who was then a Research Fellow at the ANU.

That analysis and much more appeared in the book The Commonwealth Bureaucracy published by Melbourne University Press in 1967. Caiden is now the Professor of Public Administration in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his research on administrative and public-sector reform, corruption and administrative ethics and culture. To this end he has published 30 books and upwards of 260 papers.

Personally I find the relevance of his analysis rather frightening, although not surprising. How can it be that in 40-odd years there has been no reform, no streamlining of federal/state relations? The only change has been a sneaky and surreptitious sucking of power from the states by the Commonwealth.

No matter how we might debate best outcomes in any future power sharing arrangements between state and Commonwealth government’s the significant imperative of climate change will over-ride that debate.

Climate change will force even the most altruistic, decentralised, power sharing democracy to centralise administrative arrangements in relation to husbanding and allocating scarce resources.

How long will governments be able to leave the allocation of energy to the private sector? The arrogance of price gouging by oil companies in Australia is only a foretaste of behaviour to come as shortage offers increased scope for disproportionate profit.

The storage, management and allocation of scarce water resources will need to be a nation-wide task particularly in Australia. As I write, the major irrigators and banks are moving to corner the market on water through the licensing system that greed and lack of common sense has foisted on much of eastern Australia.