Australian Federalism: Rescue and Reform
Roundtable Introduction and Overview
Andrew Podger:
The ground rules for today – a number of you have been at this
round table before and the whole aim is that we get everybody to
participate to be able to draw on their experience and expertise
for the group.
So we’ve got three questions and for each session we’re
focusing on a question. We’ve got a couple of discussion
starters. I’ll be speaking quite briefly to help open the discussion
and then our chairs will find and provoke good discussion around
the table.
A suggestion on handling that is that people might indicate to the
chair that they do want to speak so you’ve got an idea of who the
people who want to speak are.
But if somebody says something and somebody feels that they
really want to buy in right away because there’s a point to be
done rather than simply wait their turn, put your hand right up.
But only do that if you really – jump the queues but jump the
queue only to bring in something important at that time.
Today I hope we can draw on yesterday. Yesterday we went
through a number of areas which might be illustrative for things
we want to draw out in answering these three questions today,
the three questions being:
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How do we make collaboration more effective?
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How do we go beyond collaboration? One of the things we
… are things like roles and responsibilities and frameworks
so some of the fundamental questions of distribution and
powers and so on.
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The third one is how do we get to where we want to go and
what are the processes of getting all the best arrangements
that we might want to take forward?
From yesterday, John Keniry summarised that last night but can
I make just a few points which I thought might be useful?
I thought Cheryl’s introductory paper and her emphasis on
federalism and democracy was extremely useful and it gave us a
sense that as we’re looking at reform of federalism, the idea that
those reforms ought to also strengthen our democracy I think
was useful as criteria around that.
So while there might be quite a wide variation used where
federalism reform might take us, the idea that whatever it is
should be also strengthened in democracy I think is a very
powerful idea.
I think my take from yesterday was that there wasn’t a great deal
of – there wasn’t much sense of we should push powers back to
the states but there was a debate about the extent to which
powers might be pushed back to the national.
John Pincus points out that if you do bring things more to the
nationalist be careful of the trade-offs and that you actually talk
about the trade-offs carefully.
John Bannon’s point about that while it may be that Australians
identify themselves increasingly with Australia, there is still a
considerable identification with state so let’s be careful about
that.
There are some of course around the table who still think that we
ought to be abolishing the states and I understand that but I
think that for the majority of you it was more about how do we
handle increased powers referred to the national and maybe at a
state level we ought to be looking at more states.
But perhaps a bigger agenda is going to be around what do we
do about local government and regional? Another message
around that was capacity and that was particularly around local
government and regional but it was also to some extent at the
state level in picking up Cheryl’s arguments.
I think one issue that I want to see us pick up during the day is
we didn’t get very far on regionalism I felt yesterday. We got
quite a long way on the importance of local government’s
financial capacity but we only touched on some of the aspects
and I hope today we can tease that out a little bit more because I
think that’s an important issue.
In particular, if I think about the sub-national government roles
wherever those roles lie, there’s a particularly important one
about placement. How do you handle placement? How do you
handle planning?
Each level of government has a footprint on the ground. Who
manages how that footprint works? That place management
issue I think is going to be an issue I hope will come out a little
bit during the day.
That all leads me to what we want to get out of today as we start
to try and ball the threads together. A J has put on the table to
us that we might want to look to a communiqué, I think that’s a
good idea and I’d like us to try.
But if it doesn’t work I don’t think we should be substantially
disappointed because I think each of us will go away with
lessons from our own perspectives in this and be able to use
them for whatever business and role we’re planning in this
debate over the next 12 months and more.
But if we are able to come up with a communiqué it could be
useful. If that communiqué is a consensus document, I think
there’s a risk that it’s only going to be the motherhood
statements that we could have seen 12 months ago.
If we want this forum to take it some steps forward, perhaps we
should accept that the communiqué might be a bit more of the
80/20, that if it’s something that 80 per cent of the round table
feel pretty comfortable with then we’ve got it reasonably right.
Twenty per cent may feel a bit annoyed that they haven’t got
their bit in but we’ll broadly live with it but we’d rather it went a bit
further in one direction. But I think if we use an 80/20 rule we
might come up with a communiqué that’s got some substance to
it.
Jonathan Pincus:
Look, I’d say right from the start I have no interest in being a part
of a consensus type document. I think that’s not conducive for
vigorous discussion during the day and it inevitably in my
experience leads to people feeling pressured by the
circumstances to put their name to things that they actually don’t
believe in.
A J Brown:
Can I just say, so we don’t spend too much time on this, I think
we should just see how we go. Take Andrew’s suggestion and
think well wouldn’t it be nice if we did find that we were reaching
a sense along the way of points on which we were finding that
there were key themed or common – where there was a level of
agreement that was really useful to articulate.
Then just see if we get a number of those on key interesting
themes or if we’ve ended up with some of those in the afternoon,
then if we’ve got that feeling at the end of the day that we do
have some of those sorts of themes, that it would be useful to
sort of articulate them having been some of the main themes
that we’ve discussed.
Then I’m happy to have a go with assistance from Andrew and
whoever to sort of iron something up that I was thinking we could
print out and have available this evening at the dinner at the Reenactment. If people want to put red lines through things and
identify particular words or whatever, if we get that far then we
can just see where all of that ends up and if it turns into some
kind of a reflection of the meeting.
But it is useful if it goes in a useful direction. It can be quite
useful to have something that’s a reasonably contemporaneous
record of some of the ground that was covered if we get that far.
But otherwise I mean I would agree with Jonathan, I don’t
believe in trying to push through any kind of consensus for the
sake of it is a worthwhile objective.
Andrew Podger:
I certainly didn’t have in mind that we would spend a lot of time
ensuring we had a consensus. That’s what I meant by the 80/20
rule. If the 80/20 rule means that we still can’t get anywhere, well
let’s not waste our time on it because we will get benefits
notwithstanding the communiqué.
But there is an advantage with the communiqué that it allows a
momentum of this agenda to continue. So you can get out to a
wider group to say this is going on apart from any publications at
the time that the papers are being presented.
Let’s just see how that goes. We’ll put it to one side and we’ll
see later on in the day whether something emerges or not. But
with that, I’ll hand over to John Williams, chair of the first
session.