Customer Reviews

Australian Politics and Government: The Commonwealth, The States and The Territories

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If you don't know much about the Australian political system, this book is as good a place to start as any. It describes the 3 levels of government, federal, state and local. Though the latter is only briefly covered. The federal-state relationship is like that in the United States, and historically was directly modelled as such. Just over a century ago, the Australians and British who put together the new nation copied a successful American arrangement. Inspired in part by the sheer size of Australia.

The Australian Senate is the direct analog of the US Senate. Virtually equivalent in powers to the House of Representatives. Unlike Canada, whose Senate has historically been a weak institution.

From the book, you can see an analysis of the Constitution. Like the US, Australia has an explicit Constitution. Which also has rules for how to amend it. But, a key difference from the US is the lack of a Bill of Rights. In this sense, a very British thing. In Australia, then, individual rights are governed by case law, that can in fact stretch back to cases in Britain itself.

Another difference from the US is that Australian states have less power than American states. Taxation is gathered at the federal level, and the federal government then disburses portions to the states each year. So the feds control the purse strings. Plus, there are no state militias. The Constitution was drawn up in the early 1900s, not too long after the American Civil War. So a parsing of the book might suggest, perhaps cynically, that the arrangement was meant to make separation and civil war much harder to achieve.