Elsevier

Cities

Volume 63, March 2017, Pages 149-153
Cities

Viewpoint
An argument for metropolitan government in Australia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.10.013Get rights and content

Abstract

The federal government of Australia seeks to determine the selection and forms of financing of infrastructure projects in cities, and to prescribe how cities are planned and managed. This role is rationalised through reference to the UK City Deals model and is made possible by vertical fiscal imbalance (the tax revenue it raises considerably exceeds its expenditure responsibilities). Referring to the Constitution, this role is assigned to state governments that are responsible for planning, infrastructure investment and service delivery in the cities. The cities themselves comprise multiple local governments that are ‘creatures’ of state government legislation. State government metropolitan strategic plans and projects inevitably serve the interests of the constituencies needed to win the next state elections. There is no recognition of a metropolitan constituency. Documenting the economic and social disadvantages arising from Australia's form of metropolitan governance, and providing an example for expensive infrastructure mishaps arising from federal and state governments prioritising different transport modes and projects, the paper argues for the creation of representative, accountable and fiscally autonomous metropolitan governments.

Section snippets

The Australian backdrop

It has been noted that State governments are ‘directly responsible’ for planning and service delivery in Australia's metropolitan regions. During constitutional negotiations in the 1890s the ‘accepted view [was] … that local or municipal matters would remain within the ambit of State governments’ (Aulich & Pietsch, 2002: 16).2

The international context: neoliberalism and metropolitan governance

The world changed in the early 1990s. Whereas former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (2009) associates the neoliberal ‘epoch’ with Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and John Howard, among others, neoliberal hegemony emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the demise of the socialist alternative. Foremost harbingers of neoliberal hegemony were Eric Hobsbawm's (1994) The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 and Francis Fukuyama's (1992) The End of History and the

A note on global cities and centralisation in Australia

The currency of globalisation and global cities is such that it seems a necessary machismo for government. All of Australia's States except Tasmania, and also the Northern Territory, believe that their capital cities are, or should become, global or world cities.

  • The New South Wales Department of Planning and the Environment titled its 2014 strategic plan for metropolitan Sydney, ‘A STRONG GLOBAL CITY’, noting that ‘Sydney is an iconic global city and it is growing’.

  • The State of Victoria's Plan

A framework for metropolitan government

Informed by international experience, Jane-Frances Kelly (2010: 4) questions whether ‘the institutions which govern and manage our cities have sufficiently evolved’. Kelly and Donegan (2015: no page no.) hold that Australia's cities ‘are broken’ and ‘are no longer keeping up with changes in how we live and how our economy works’. Needless to say I agree with the view that Australia's cities are insufficiently evolved and argue the need for evolution towards metropolitan government.

The process

Conclusion

Australia's constitutional negotiations had to do with the ‘politics of integrating six colonies’ that centered on ‘the federal idea’ (Appleby et al., 2012: 1), with the colonies conceding as little power and fiscal resources as possible to the Federal government. In this the colonies singularly failed, with primary responsibility for this outcome being the centralization of tax revenue and various High Court decisions (see Phillimore & Harwood, 2015). Intergovernmental relations in Australia

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