You've asked a pretty big question there Larry, probably to big to be answered on this forum. Here's a link to get you started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Australia and you can get more info from your search engine using the term Australian Federation.

Dave

Landfall wrote:

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That is always an interesting subject with many opinions.~~~ SNIP

IMO the state governments should be gotten rid of and a largerrepresentative of equal number from each state should be in the federal parliament. This would balance out the sharing of resources and money.

Local government would be then more accountable for projects and money from a federal budget.

Never gonna happen though.

Ken 

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Gday....

HMMMMMM .... sounds a bit like the Senate

Cheers - John

The basis of representative democracy is that the vote of one person is equal to that of all others (as near as is feasible). The House of Representatives and most State lower houses operate on that principle. If you bring in a Senate type system for the House of Reps, then the smaller number of people from states like Tasmania would be electing equal number of representatives as those from more populated states like NSW. i.e. unequal voting power.

The Senate was not meant to be a democratic house - it had equal representation from each state, in order to safeguard the interests of the smaller states against Vic and NSW. Otherwise the smaller states would not have agreed to federation.

As said above, the State governments came first - and were set up as self-government was gained from Britain (at different times). In late 1800's, it was not envisaged that the proposed new federal government would come to have the dominance it does today. It was only meant to deal with things like raising an army and navy, where it was obviously silly to have them from each state; run a postal service and the like. But one of the powers ceded by the states to the new government was the - then totally insignificant - power to levy income taxes, and the rest is history. As the federal government's control of the nation's money increased, so did its overall powers. One could be a cynic and say that these days it suits the states to be this way - they can always blame Canberra for their own poor administrations and claim that Canberra does not give them enough funds - and most people do not know that the States have the powers to do a whole lot more taxing and revenue raising for themselves - but they don't want to be unpopular!

In this age of modern communications and decreasing differences between the states, I view our federal system as wasteful. Should have Canberra government and agencies at local level - which would not correspond to current states, necessarily. We would save a lot of money on duplicated State Parliaments and their admin and elections, and MP's salaries.

Off my soapbox!

It could be that the federal government would allocate resources on something other than a State basis. For example, it may be decided that areas with a certain percentage of people above 70 years old, receive extra funds for geriatric units in their hospitals. Schools with a certain percentage of aboriginal students get extra funding. Such policy decisions would make the old State divisions redundant. Back in the early days, they were just arbitrary lines drawn on a map - with the exception of Tasmania, not much logic to the boundaries.