Wisdom of the Elders

In my last post, Hicks, blogs and our view of the past, I mentioned the fascinating ABC program, the wisdom of the elders, looking at the differences in Australia between 1957 and 2007.

There was so much interest in the program that ABC has put it up for download. Because of the program's length, three hours, they have had to break it up into several sections. I commend it not just to Australians, but also to my international readers because of the interesting picture it shows of Australian life.

Hicks, blogs and our view of the past

Yesterday Richard Glover on ABC 702 Sydney had a session on the wisdom of the elders in which he combined a studio audience of those in their seventies and those in their twenties.

He also combined interviewees into pairs - one in their seventies, one in the twenties - talking about the differences between now and 1957 in particular areas. So a teacher who was teaching in 1957, a new teacher today. As part of this, the ABC has an on-line poll asking people whether things have got better or worse since then.

I loved the program because it covered so many of the issues that I have tried to cover on this blog when talking about social and cultural change.

I was interested to discover that the perceptions of the gains and losses since 1957 among the two age groups were remarkably similar. We can summarise the key losses as seen by both groups as an increase in fear and insecurity combined with a loss of manners and a rise in self-centered approaches.

Interestingly, those I heard interviewed from both age groups thought that today was better than 1957. However, this is not reflected in the still open on-line poll. Here, as of this morning, 71 per cent thought that 1957 was better, only 29 per cent thought that today was better. The numbers bounce around a bit as more people vote, but so far the pattern has been quite consistent.

Just for the record, I agree with the common view of the losses. I also voted yes for improvement, primarily because of the gains that have been made in reduced sectarianism (I remember the Roman Catholic/Protestant split very clearly), in greater opportunities for women and in sexual tolerance.

One of the points made in discussion on Richard's program, one that I agree with, is the decline in the standard of general reporting and of parliamentary debate, an increase in trivialisation.

One simple example to illustrate what I mean.

In 1957 the Commonwealth Treasurer's budget speech went for several hours, was broadcast in its entirety, and covered the entire budget. Few people listened, but those did got the whole story detail and all.

Today, the speech has to be fitted into the television spot, with all the details left out. It is no longer possible to properly understand the budget from the speech. Further, the speech has to be crafted to provide the following headlines, rather than the provision of information and argument.

We now depend upon those who have seen the full papers in the lock-up for informed analysis. Frankly, I would prefer to rely on my own judgement.

There is a silver lining in this, and that is the influence of the on-line environment and especially blogging. Now this is where I want to bring David Hicks in.

With David Hicks we have seen the long, slow, sweep of changing public opinion, a sweep that has now built into a wave. To a degree, the truth or otherwise of the allegations made about him no longer matter, what now matters is the building consensus that he has been badly treated, that we have failed him as a country, that none of us would want to be treated in the same way.

Last night I watched the face on my eldest as the Prime Minister said that the US would have released Hicks at any time had the Government asked.

Then watching Minister Ruddock we appeared to have the position that Hicks is not guilty of any Australian crime, that the Government did not act because they wanted him tried under US law where a crime had, apparently, been committed. Crudely, since Hicks has not broken our law we wanted him tried elsewhere.

Unlike younger Clare, Helen has tended to favour the Liberal party. As I watched her face and listened to her gut reaction to the PM and Minister Ruddock, I could see what I suspect is the final switch in her position as she tracks into her first Commonwealth vote later in the year. I do not know what Helen's friends think, but will try to find out since my impression is that they are more conservative than Clare's friends.

Now what has all this to do with the on-line environment? Now here I am responding as a social commentator regardless of my personal views on David Hicks.

In Don Aitkin's book on the NSW Country Party he pointed to the slow process that was involved in building a common set of views, in creating an organisation, in a world where most communication went by mail and people met rarely because of distance.

Just to introduce a complete red herring here. I was fascinated and indeed pleased to discover that for alphabetical reasons Don was the first ever student admitted to the University of New England after we gained autonomy from the University of Sydney back in 1954!

Now we live in a very different world.

The on-line environment makes for far faster cooperation and also allows people to find out more information more quickly. This helps people who want to create new movements, but also helps those like me who want to find out facts without the filtration process provided by our media or political leaders. This means that things can build faster.

Within this mix, blogs are coming to play a very particular role, one still only partially seen although the macro effects are coming to be recognised.

A little while ago, Lexcen and I talked about the role of blogs and bloggers. Bloggers, today, have become the commentators in place of the main line media. I can see this in a small way in my own case.

Neil (Ninglun) put up a story on David Hicks. I followed with my first story, then several more. I am not pretending that I had a profound effect. But when I look at the pattern of hits, I can see that dozens of poeple have visited, searching on Hicks. Because I provided links, at least some of those have gone on to look at other evidence.

Today Neil ran a new story including a cross link to my posts. That story triggered this one. I know that Neil's story will lead to new hits on my past posts. And then there are those who will read this post. So we have Neil's readers plus mine.

Multiply this blog by hundreds, and you can see why blogs are now becoming important as a source of information and comment that cannot be easily controlled, at least in a free society.

Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Power will be Exercised

In my previous posts in this series I outlined the constitutional views expressed by David Drummond in 1926. I am now going to extend this analysis by looking at Drummond's principles in light of current experience.

There is a strong continuing view in Australia that the present Federal structure should be replaced by a union government with regional councils with delegated powers leaving the national government with power of veto.

Drummond had a simple answer to this: he pointed to the experience of local government in NSW. There the central government had drawn all power to itself, "leaving but the shadow to the local governing authorities."

This result, Drummond suggested, was inevitable in a unitary system; "whenever a political party sees the opportunity of strengthening its position at the expense of something or someone else, it will not be deterred by purely academic considerations."

I don't think that there can be any arguments with this one.

As I write, the Blair Labor Government in the UK is in the process of over-riding Scottish law on adoptions, while in Australia the Attorney General has signalled the the Commonwealth Parliament will again over-ride the ACT Government's proposed legislation granting legal recognition to same sex couples. We have previously seen the Commonwealth Government act to over-ride Northern Territory legislation. All three parliaments - Scotland, ACT and NT - operate under powers delegated by the national parliament.

You may or may not think that this is a bad thing. But the principle does need to be taken into account in any discussions on constitutional reform.

Importance of Parliament

While picking up the kids I listened to the Parliamentary debates on the death of Jim Killen. One of the points made was the importance he placed on Parliament.

I was struck by this because today we tend to ignore Parliament as an institution focusing instead on Government or opposition. Yet Parliament is central to the freedoms we now enjoy in Australia.

Prior to the English Civil Wars the Government, in that case the King, was paramount, ruling by divine right. I suspect that some of our Governments still think that they rule by divine right, although we now wrap this up in the phrase "the national interest".

Growing up, I favoured the King's side, the Cavaliers, because they were so much more interesting. Here one of my favourite books was Captain Marryat's book The Children of the New Forest. As I grew older I came to realise the constitutional importance of the conflict.

The bottom line was the paramount role of Parliament as the elected body representing the people. Parliament was then not fully representative and indeed would not be for many centuries. But the principle was there.

When the NSW Country Party leader Mick Bruxner was elected to Parliament he took the view that upon election he owed an obligation to Parliament, not just his individual electors. This required him to represent all the people, not just those who voted for him or those in his electorate.

Bruxner had a reverence for Parliament. When, late in his career, he was forced to disagree with the Labor Party Speaker upon a matter of principle and was expelled from the Legislative Assembly, he was white and shaking. This was not a matter of political point scoring - here today, back tomorrow - but a fundamental matter of principle. To be expelled from the house was a fundamental issue of values.

My personal view is that Parliament - not Government - remains central. We have to remember and respect, defend, the role of Parliament or risk losing our core values and freedoms.

Exciting News - but I can't tell you or you would have to kill me!

Exciting news today for my wife. But I can't yet say anything pending an announcement.

The last fifteen months have been an awfully difficult period for the Rosebery Belshaws. I really mean awful. Sometimes it has seemed that everything that could go wrong will go wrong. During this period I have tried to maintain a positive public outlook even though inwardly I felt very differently.

We (I) are not there yet. There is still some very troubled water to navigate.

I could not say anything on-line about the problems simply because that would have added to the difficulties. But I have kept detailed notes. When I get through, or if I don't get through so that it no longer matters, I will report on all this because I think that it shows something about the underbelly of Australian life.

In the meantime, we have tried to push forward as a family collective and in so doing have begun to achieve results.

Eldest daughter, Helen, enrolled in business studies at UTS at the start of 2006. That was a mistake for a whole raft of reasons. Now she has moved to economics/arts at UNSW and is she excited! Yes, we have an added year's HECS, but that is a small price to pay.

Younger daughter, Clare, has absolutely blossomed. Doing 14 units in the HSC this year, she is presently negotiating with her parents to drop maths, bringing her back to twelve units. I think that she will drop maths, although she is going to do her best in the next test, but the process she had followed means that she has a great future in complex international diplomacy!

Wife Denise made a conscious decision to accept redundancy because she believed that, in terms of what she wanted to do, her firm could not deliver. This had costs, but now she is breaking through.

For my part, blogging has proved to be my salvation. Not only have I enjoyed it, but I have been able to measure my knowledge and skills against an international standard. And I shape up!

As I said, once we are through the next round I will explain in more detail. My experiences have changed me in quite fundamental ways. In the meantime, we keep driving forward.

New Barbarians?

Photo: John Calvin

Like most people trained in history, I look for historical examples to explain and inform the present. Without getting caught in a debate about the extent to which there are lessons of history, I do find past examples helpful.

So when I look at something like present religious fundamentalism or the desire to make religious law obligatory in particular communities I can think back, for example, to Calvin and Zwingli. If I want examples of the human tendency to force others to convert or conform, I have an absolute smorgasbord to pick from.

In all this, when I look at the history of European civilisation, I can see just that, the progressive development of a civilisation. I say European civilisation because I do not know enough of other streams to exactly follow the same process there, although I am sure that it exists.

The civilising process was never uniform nor exact. There were major retreats from time to time, but the progress was there.

Alfred North Whitehead's Adventure of Ideas traced this process through in a European context showing how different threads came together to create European civilisation. Whitehead published this book in 1933 and did not see the uniquely European barbarism that was to come with Hitler and the Nazis.

But even here, when we look at the outcomes, the Second World War introduced the concept of war crimes. Further, the German people were not punished, as Rome punished Carthage, through extermination down to ploughing the fields with salt. Instead, Germany was rebuilt, while Europe itself moved to put put previous civil wars behind it by creating the EU.

Now my point in all this is that the suicide bomber who deliberately targets innocent people is an on-going example of the pathology in the human soul between evil and good that the civilising process tries to address.

Being willing to die for a cause is a human trait. The desire to exterminate your enemy is another human trait. The suicide bomber combines both with the use of simple modern technology.

In saying all this, I am not being negative. I am, however, concerned at two levels.

At level one is the risk that in trying to protect the things that we love we will destroy just the things that we want to protect.

At level two, and this is where I think that I part company with Neil in one of his posts, I think that we have become so wishy washy and politically correct that we have become uncertain of and are no longer prepared to defend the core western values that we have developed.

I may be wrong here and stand to be corrected. I also exempt Neil himself from my charge. He does defend his own views strongly, but always with the courtesy and humour that should mark civilised debate.

Upcoming NSW Elections

For those of my readers interested in Australian political matters, the NSW elections will be held in March. Here I see that Antony Green's usual valuable election guide is up on the ABC web site.

By all measures, the current NSW Government should be in political trouble because of resignations, scandals and policy problems. However, the swing required for defeat is so large that there is a common view that the Government will be returned.

For what it's worth, my gut judgement at this point is that the most likely outcome is a hung lower house with independents holding the balance of power.

With the most recent resignation of the member for Newcastle, Bryce Gaudrey, from the ALP, the current makeup of the NSW Parliament is labor 52, Liberal 18, National 12 and Independent 10.

Antony Green's analysis of the notional impact of the latest electoral redistribution provided as part of the Guide is presently down so I cannot look properly at this. However, the continued rise of high profile independents remains a threat to all the existing parties.

According to Antony's analysis, the government can lose up to eight seats and still govern with a majority. The Coalition requires a uniform swing of 8.7% to win nine seats and deprive Labor of its majority. However, the independents have to be factored in.

Assuming the seven elected Independents are re-elected, then the Coalition needs to win 16 seats from Labor to achieve majority government in its own right. That translates into a massive uniform swing of 12.3%, a swing figure without precedent in the last eight decades.

Antony suggest that somewhere in between these figures of 8.7% and 12.3% lies the territory of a hung parliament. Depending on whether the Coalition wins any seats from Independents, or whether Labor loses seats to Independents and Greens, the question becomes whether Labor or the Coalition will end up with more seats, and who the Independents would back for government.

Now link all this back to the numbers.

On a 9% uniform swing - swings are never uniform - the ALP would lose six seats: Tweed, Monaro, Wollondilly, Penrith, Port Stephens and Kiama. The ALP is also vulnerable in the Lower Hunter in Newcastle, Swansea and Maitland where high profile Independents including Bryce Gaudrey are running. If Labor loses two of these three, and this does seem possible at this point, then Labor has lost its majority. On the other side of the ledger, the Coalition is also vulnerable to Independents in some seats.

So waving my pen in the air and taking the back of a handy envelope, my best guess at the moment is that Labor will lose 6-7 seats to the coalition, two to independents, with the Coalition losing perhaps one seat to independents. A hung parliament.

Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Constitutional principles

This is third post in the series looking at the constitutional views set out in David Drummond's 1926 booklet Constitutional Changes in Australia.

In the first post I introduced Drummond and the booklet, while the second began our discussion of his views.

To Drummond, Australian constitutional thought could be broken into three schools: the state righters (today we say states righters) who were in favour of the existing Federal structure as is; the unificationists who wanted to abolish the states and replace them with county or regional councils; and the new staters who occupied the middle ground in that they wanted the existing states broken up into a larger number of units but with real powers of self government so that local issues could be properly dealt with on a local basis.

As someone who had been campaigning for self government for New England, Drummond wrote from the perspective of the third school.

He rejected the state righters out of hand. He thought it absurd to suggest that the constitution should remain fixed in stone for all time. In any event, those who supported this position were already in an untenable position in that the High Court - and this is 1926 - had already established the principle that, subject to certain qualifications, a wide construction could be placed on Commonwealth powers through the interpretation of the Constitution in a literal sense, regardless of the consequent overlap with, and impact on, existing state activities.

Because the unificationist and new state positions had common elements, Drummond focused his analysis on the unificationist school, drawing out the similarities and differences between that and the new state position.

If, he suggested, the regional bodies had no real independent power then they would become simple creatures of the union government, unable to provide effective local administration truly reflecting local needs. If they were given real powers then, and so long as they were of a sufficient size, they in fact became new states.

Principles to Underlay Constitutional Change

Drummond then extended his analysis to try to further articulate the principles that should underly constitutional change.

Constitutional change must be determined, he suggested, by certain broad principles. The first of these could be summarised as "geographical considerations affect Government."

Because Australia's vast size and geographical variation made central control difficult, the country needed a system of government that could keep in effective touch with every part of the Commonwealth in the most direct manner; that is "it must provide real Local Government."

To ensure this, the local units must control everything not purely national in operation, while their constitutional rights must be safeguarded from undue interference by the central government. Further, within the ambit of their powers, they must be given the right to amend their own constitutions subject to reasonable safeguards against temporary majorities.

The areas of these local units should be determined at their own request, but must be of sufficient size to prevent too great an aggregation of legislative and administrative work being thrown onto the central government. "In other words it must be clear that if the reduction of areas is carried to extremes it will inevitably mean an increase in central government control and a corresponding diminution of Local Government." Finally, any constitutional change must also be determined with due regard to the Commonwealth's ability to fulfil its international obligations.

Proposed Restructuring of the Australian Constitution

Drummond then put forward his proposals for a restructuring of the Australian constitution.

He suggested, first, that Australia should adopt the Canadian principle under which the central government exercised power over all subjects not exclusively passed to the provinces. The effect of this would have been to shift the focus from the question of what things should be done nationally to the definition of those things that should properly be done at local level, a very different perspective.

He suggested, secondly, that areas such as northern and southern NSW or northern and central Queensland should be given immediate local government, while underdeveloped areas of the existing states should be turned into federal territories. Again, Drummond had Canada in mind: following the Canadian precedent, the new territories should be controlled by a commission of four, with conditional legislative powers "until such time times as their progress justified, first, the inclusion of an elected consultative Council, and later a grant of full local governing powers."

The effect of this proposal would have been a wholesale restructuring of the constitutional and political map of Australia. NSW, for example, would probably have been broken up into four provinces plus some Federal territory.

From today's perspective with our formally rigid constitutional frame, the proposals may seem naive in that we know that all existing constitutional units will fight to the death to protect their entrenched positions. Even in the 1920s when major change still seemed possible, the political barriers to this type of approach were clear, the chances of adoption slim.

Still Drummond and his immediate colleagues took the matter seriously.

Five thousand copies of the booklet were printed and widely circulated. Drummond sent copies to everybody he thought might be interested or influenced, while his friends and colleagues did likewise. Since there was no way that Drummond could afford printing costs - he had few assets, a young family and only his parliamentary salary - donations were sought with the wealthier Mick Bruxner underwriting the project in the meantime.

Drummond's own attitude towards the project was clearly revealed in September 1926 when Ern Sommerlad, the Glen Innes Examiner's Managing Director, told him that he wanted to break up the type used for the booklet. Drummond, still hoping that demand would justify a second edition, wrote Sommerlad a very still and formal letter indeed.

Sommerlad, knowing Drummond well, responded in a friendly but firm fashion: "Your terribly fearsome letter arrived today, representing much wasted effort on your part", he wrote. Explaining why they needed the type, he asked Drummond to let him know immediately what his plans were, concluding with a P.S.: "there's not going to be any booklet argument as far as this chicken's concerned."

Drummond's hopes that the booklet would have an immediate popular impact were unrealistic. However, it did have a significant continuing influence on New England and country political thought.

In my next post in this series I will look at some of the principles and issues that Drummond raised in the frame set by my own experience and knowledge.

Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Three streams of constitutional thought

In my last post I introduced David Drummond's 1926 booklet Constitutional Changes in Australia.

Drummond began by dividing Australian constitutional thought into three schools, the state righters (today we say states righters), the new staters and the unificationists.

The state righters were those who believed in the Federation as then constituted, including the existing structure and the existing distribution of powers between Commonwealth and states. By contrast, the unificationists wanted to abolish the states and replace them with counties with delegated powers operating under central control in a fashion similar to that in Britain. The new staters occupied the middle ground: they wanted to retain the Federal system but replace the larger states with smaller states while redistributing powers between the Commonwealth and States.

The State Rights Position

Drummond rejected the state right position out of hand. He had previously argued that Commonwealth and state powers should be redistributed, and now regarded it as self-evident that the present division of powers could not be right and proper for all time.

He was prepared to accept that, given the existing constitution, the states should predominate in Commonwealth-state disputes in order to prevent duplication of activities. However, he pointed out that the High Court's decision in the Amalgamated Engineers' case had already destroyed this position beyond recall by establishing the principle that, subject to certain qualifications, a wide construction could be placed on Commonwealth powers through the interpretation of the Constitution in a literal sense, regardless of the consequent overlap with, and impact on, existing state activities.

Drummond ended by dismissing the state rights school as lacking in any "understanding of the new national spirit abroad in Australia which is demanding a settlement of the anomalies which this very school succeeded in fastening on to the Federal Constitution."

The Unificationist School

Drummond's position towards the second constitutional school, the unificationists, was very different.

Many of the arguments put forward to support the unification school were similar to those used by the separatists (new staters) to justify their position. To gain statehood, the separatists had to defeat the state righters with their support for the status quo. But they had also to overcome the distracting road block created by the unificationists. For that reason, Drummond devoted a number of articles to first defining and then rebutting this school.

Unification, he suggested, was expected to bring many benefits: one parliament would mean reduced costs of legislation, one government would mean reduced costs of administration and greater efficiency in handling Australia's problems, while uniform laws would reduce friction. However, in practice unification could not deliver such benefits.

Dealing first with the cost of Government, Drummond distinguished between the cost of government policies and programs, the general costs of the civil service and the administration, and the costs of parliamentary government, that is the parliaments, ministers, politicians, electoral arrangements, royal commissions and select committees.

On the cost of policies and programs, Drummond suggested that the cost of most programs, defence for example, were independent of the system of government and should not be blamed on it. On the cost of administration, he attacked the popular idea that Australia had too many government employees, suggesting that in some cases such as teachers it had too few. In any event, the creation of a unified civil service was likely to increase, not reduce, the size and cost of the civil service since it would require the creation of a new hierarchy of public servants over and above the existing state services.

So far as the cost of parliamentary government was concerned, Drummond suggested that there seemed to be the assumption that every citizen carried the cost of seven governments. This was a fallacy; each citizen supported only two, the Commonwealth and one state, plus of course whatever system of local government was in vogue in that state. He also pointed out that while the average cost per head of parliamentary government (Commonwealth plus the relevant state) varied from state to state, the national average at three shillings and five pence was very low, "little more than the cost of registering a dog." There was no reason to believe, he suggested, that the cost of a union government plus provincial or county council would work out less than three shillings and five pence per head.

Drummond then turned to the likely impact of unification on the legislative process. He started by suggesting that laws were "merely the means of regulating forces by directing them into proper channels." Should those channels not exist or become blocked, then the result was grave unrest among the people affected. By its very nature, legislation tended "to standardize the conditions under which people must live and conduct their business." As a result, "practically every law inflicts some hardship on someone or other." This outcome, which was usually justified on the grounds that you can only legislate for the great majority, was not acceptable in Australia because of its size and geographical diversity.

To support this point, Drummond pointed out that Australia's growth had led to a growth in the volume and complexity of legislation. Since much of this legislation related to specifically local issues, its transfer to a union parliaments would overload that parliament with relatively trivial matters, In this regard, the war had involved Australia in international relationships "which must and should absorb a great deal of the attention of our statesmen." However, this job could not be done efficiently "if our statesmen are submerged in a mass of local legislation and detail, or harassed by friction as at present, with States over-conscious of their dignity and importance."

Already, Drummond suggested, the Commonwealth Parliament had failed to use to the full its powers in important fields such as marriage and divorce legislation. "Nothing is more embarrassing than the artificial restrictions caused by the State boundaries, and nothing more desirable than uniform legislation in regard to these matters."

The obvious answer to any overload problem was to leave all minor legislation to the country or regional councils. To Drummond, the key issue here was the powers to be given to such councils. Should they be given legislative powers free from outside interference then they would, to that extent, become new states in their own right. "It is necessary that this should be clearly understood", Drummond wrote, "as it is very evident that many people who call themselves Unificationists are really New Staters, or at least they believe in a large number of States with reduced powers and paraphernalia of State."

To those who wanted the new councils to have delegated powers only, leaving the central government with right of veto, Drummond had a simple answer: he pointed to the experience of local government in NSW. There the central government had drawn all power to itself, "leaving but the shadow to the local governing authorities."

This result, Drummond suggested, was inevitable in a unitary system; "whenever a political party sees the opportunity of strengthening its position at the expense of something or someone else, it will not be deterred by purely academic considerations."

The New Staters

In the last sections of Constitutional Changes in Australia, Drummond articulated principles that should underlie constitutional change and linked these to the new state position. I will look at this in my next post.

Constitutional Change in Australia - the view from 1926: Introduction

Note to Readers: This is the introductory post in a short series looking at the 1926 constitutional views of the Australian politician and writer David Drummond. My aim is use past thought to inform current debate on the Australian Federation. Because it is a series I will add a full list of posts at the end once the series is complete.

In my post on Australian Constitution & the High Court Decision on Work Choices I commented on the remarkable intellectual poverty in current debates about Australia's Federal structure, an assertion I repeated in my post Australian Federalism in an International Context.

These were assertions. I thought, therefore, that I might illustrate my point by taking a 1926 example.

In 1926 David Drummond, the Country Party member for Armidale and a New England new state leader, wrote a series of articles on constitutional reform for Country Life, a farmer newspaper. Later in 1926, these were gathered together and, with a forward by fellow NSW Country Party parliamentarian Mick Bruxner, published under the title Constitutional Changes in Australia. Current Problems & Contributing Factors. A Non-Party examination of the Position (Glen Innes Examiner Office).

Drummond was then 36 and had been a member of the NSW Parliament for six years. He would go on to be a member of the NSW and Federal Parliaments until 1963, including twelve years as Minster for Education in NSW. Partly because his Party had no constitutional expert, Drummond saw this as important, he set himself to learn about constitutional issues and was active in constitutional debates over his political career.

Constitutional Change in Australia can hardly be classified as literature: Drummond's lack of formal education (he left school at 12) was still apparent in his sometimes clumsy phrasing, while the articles were repetitive and written in a popular style. Nevertheless, the results present a developed framework, one that was to provide an evolving framework for one stream of Australian constitutional debate over the next forty years.

It is also a framework that affected my own views since Drummond was my grandfather and I used to debate the issues with him. I have added or changed things because of my own experience in politics and public administration, but the core frame remains.

Paddle Steamers - Inter State fights over control of the Murray Darling System

Back in July last year I wrote a post on the New England Australia blog about the role that inter-state rivalries played in the rise and fall of the paddle steamer along the Murray-Darling River system.

This post has become relevant because people are now referring to history in the context of the current Commonwealth bid for control of the system.

The post indicates clearly the problems that have arisen in the past. Whether these problems justify current moves is a broader question.

I hope that you find the post interesting.

Australian Federalism in an International Context

In my post Australian Constitution & the High Court Decision on Work Choices I said in part:

From experience, I have absolutely no doubt that Commonwealth Governments of all political persuasions will attempt to use the now established power. It would be silly to think otherwise. The very words the Prime Minister uses - in the national interest, in the public good - indicate this since these matters are very much in the eye of the beholder.

In my later post Water, new states and the intellectual poverty of current Australian discussions on Federalism I commented on what I saw as the quite remarkable intellectual poverty of the current Australian debate on Federalism, linking this to the decline of the New England and other new state movements because of the consistent and important role they had played in forcing constitutional discussion. I concluded:

We have a choice. We can proceed as of now allowing constitutional change to proceed by a series of ad hoc incremental steps. Alternatively, we can stand back from the immediate issues and try to re-articulate the principles that we think should guide our Federal structure, taking previous thinking into account.

Put these two together and we have the current Federal Government with its desire to remake the constitution in its own image, subjecting the Federation to the death of a thousand cuts. I will comment on this in a moment. First, I want to put the Australian case in an international context for the benefit of my international readers.

Over the last forty years we have seen major changes in political structures at global, continental and country level. We have seen countries break up under the pressure of waring groups seeking self determination in ways that were inconceivable forty years ago. The very legitimacy of national governments has come under question.

In all this complex mix, Federal arrangements have emerged as one way of managing conflicting interests in order to preserve a measure of political unity.

In parallel, we have seen the growth of supra-national agencies and of increasingly complex international arrangements as nation states seek to deal with complex issues in a globalising world. Issues associated with joint decision making, power and resource sharing have become increasingly important. These are just the issues that are central to Federations and the constitutional theory of Federalism.

Yet despite all this, there appears to have been very little recent international discussion about the constitutional theories of Federalism. My impression is that interest in this area has been in decline since the 1960s.

Take Iraq as an example. The discussions that I have seen, I accept that I have only seem some, appear to focus on a Federal structure as a political solution. That is obviously important. However, I do find it odd that there has been so little discussion about the constitutional and theoretical bases of Federalism and their application to the Iraq situation.

In considering this question, I think it important to recognise that the world's longer lasting Federal systems such as the USA, Canada and Australia developed in different political and cultural frames.

In all cases, Federation was a way of accommodating difference. However, the constitutional theories that developed in each country were coloured by local conditions. This means that the Federal model developed in one country cannot simply be transferred to another country but must first be transmuted to meet local conditions.That said, I believe that the lessons of Federalism including the differences between federal systems can provide important guides to the future at country and trans-national levels.

Linking all this back to the Australian case. Here, or so I have argued, we need to move from the current ad-hoc approach to re-articulate the principles that should underlie our Federal structure. If I am right about the broader international context, then the conclusions we draw could well have relevance beyond the immediate Australian scene.