1 - National Problems, Federal Solutions

Summary

Australia's federal system has undergone a fundamental reshaping in recent years. State and Commonwealth governments have found themselves, often against their immediate wishes, cooperating ever more closely on joint schemes of policy and administration. As a consequence there has been a shift in the rules of the game of federal politics towards collaborative, as distinct from arm's-length, patterns of intergovernmental relations. While conflict and political sparring remain commonplace, state and Commonwealth ministers and officials are more and more to be observed sitting around the table and devising joint schemes of policy and administration that emphasise national uniformity and the removal of interstate barriers and differences. While the history of such collaboration goes back a long way, the advent of Bob Hawke's New Federalism in 1990, and the work of the Special Premiers' Conferences (SPC) and the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) that resulted from this initiative, greatly accelerated the trend. Just to give a few examples, state and Commonwealth governments since 1990 have agreed on a national competition policy; established a scheme of mutual recognition that sweeps away many barriers to interstate trade that formerly existed due to differing systems of state regulation; set up a National Road Transport Commission to devise new, uniform schemes of road vehicle regulation to be implemented by state governments; and introduced uniform gun laws. These and many other examples are discussed in this book. State and Commonwealth ministers and officials are not only cooperating more on joint schemes, they are doing so in new ways that blur their distinctiveness as separate political actors in a federal system.