The objectives are to‘reduce and end, as far as possible, the waste, duplication
and second guessing between different levels of government’;‘achieve a more
efficient and effective Federation, and in so doing, improve national product-
ivity’; and to‘make interacting with government simpler for citizens’(ibid.,
p. 107).
Australian government is not seen as an arrangement of polities on a federal
basis but essentially as a holistic, hierarchical administrative system for the
provision and funding of services. It is the operation of this system which
preoccupies the paper.
In so doing, it evokes some of the usual criticisms of federalism such as
overlap and duplication. This is a hardy perennial in any discussion of feder-
alism, but evidence and illustration has proven much harder to come by. By
contrast, there will certainly be transaction costs in the working of a Feder-
ation and these will not only befinancial; these, unfortunately, are rarely
identified or considered.
From the beginning, the green paper is ambivalent about federalism. It
opines, in thefirst paragraph, that‘Australia’s Federation has worked well
since 1901.’It enquires, shortly afterwards, if‘our Federation [is] stillfit for
purpose?’(ibid., p. 1). It later concludes that‘while the Federation is mostly
working well, it is not working as well as it could, and this is contributing to a
lack of confidence and trust in our system of government to deliver better
services’(ibid., p. 2).
It is, however, unable, or at least unwilling, to speak of‘federalism’itself as a
philosophy or a method of government. It prefers instead to speak of‘Feder-
ation’as‘thesystem of national governance’(emphasis added). It is as if
‘Federation’is simply a name for what is otherwise a single structure of
government, albeit tiered. The green paper’s preoccupation is with the‘pres-
sure on all governments’budgets’and the need‘to secure Australia’s future as
a high wage and internationally competitive economy’(ibid., p. 2), that is to
say, publicfinance and expenditure rather than federal governance.
The paper asks but does not answer clearly:‘what is the problem we are
trying to solve?’It records that, according to one survey, more than 80 per cent
of Australians think the performance of the Federation could be improved, but
it confesses that‘what is not as clear is whether that problem is with the model
of federalism, a perception of being“over governed”, or something more
concrete’(ibid., p. 4).
The paper conceives improvement in bureaucratic terms:
Reform of the Federation will be worthwhile if it improves the incentives to deliver
better services, enhances the accountability of all governments to Australians for
taxes being well spent, drives productivity improvements and economic growth,
and improves the way governments work together. (ibid., p. 10)
J. R. Nethercote