A continuing confusion? A comment on the appropriate dispersal of policy powers in the Australian federation

Abstract

Dissatisfaction with Australia's federalist constitutional and administrative arrangements seems universal. The Labor Party has historically preferred a centralist thrust to the Australian federal compact. From the opposite, decentralist tack the Liberal‐National Coalition parties currently propose that the Commonwealth should hive‐off policy functions to the States. These attitudes are expressed in an intellectual climate that disparages the allocative efficiency of Australian federalism and debates these issues in terms of shifting power to or from the Commonwealth. A more sensible focus is on the usage that the citizenry has made of the federal system in obtaining satisfactory service delivery. Using this approach our federal system works efficiently (in a limited political‐administrative sense. This is not an argument that Australia's federal system is good because it maximises fiscal efficiency or guarantees equity. It does not do the former'and varies in its attainment of the latter. The federal sys...