Today is the 10th anniversary of self-government.
It is also 22 years and three months since an ACT referendum on self-government voted 63.5 per cent No; 31.1 per cent Yes and 5.4 per cent for local government. (There was a very low 1.6 per cent informal vote.)
Many people still cling to that result. Surely it is a stale result now. No-one under 40 would have voted in it. About 100,000 people have come to the ACT since then.
I have been a proponent of self-government since the issue became alive in the mid-1970s. Of course, the practice has not been as good as the theory. Those exercising self-government have not been paragons of fiscal competence or social rectitude. Maybe I am in the position of Rumpole faced with a fawning Indian law clerk praising the fact that under British rule the trains ran on time but now there was chaos. Rumpole replied: “”At least they are your trains.”
Self-government is not only a right, but a duty.
On the 10th anniversary it is odd that Canberra at once houses the noble sentiments of the constitutional convention’s call for a preamble and this resentment of local self-government.
The national recognition of the self-evidence of self-rule does not sit well with the pockets of local anger at it.
I think the anger is subsiding, though.
A lot of anti-self-government people have fallen for the fallacy of “”after this therefore because of this”. Services seem to have deteriorated since self-government. Redevelopment has eroded residential amenity in some older areas and greenfields development is no longer of the quality of the old National Capital Development Commission when some quality bureaucrats ran the town. There seems to be less public space. The shops and community facilities lag the population in the new areas. And so on.
Fact is, that stuff would have happened anyway. Indeed, it would have been worse without self-government.
It is difficult to see the ACT as an island of immunity in a general 1990s push by government to out-source, downsize and privatise. An ACT run by the federal government alone would have been the first victim of the process.
Bear in mind the ACT had long been a guinea pig for whatever policy fad was infecting federal minds at the time. In Whitlam days it was regional development, public housing and infrastructure and the big federal push into health and education. The ACT lapped it up.
In the 1990s we would have equally had to lap up the federal trends of the time. As users we would have paid.
But self-government has had two major drawbacks in the ACT.
The first is that as the seat of federal government it has a significant community of federal bureaucrats, diplomats, lobbyists, industry associations and the like. These people focus on the big picture – the national and international issues. Many of these people take a perverse pride in taking no interest and having no knowledge of local governance. They look down their noses at it. As a result, some of the best critics, whose criticism could work to improve local governance, are lost to the city.
Secondly, the city has a very high proportion of workers for and contractors to government. It does not do their careers much good to involve themselves actively in politics, particularly party politics. (Office politics, of course is another matter.) A half of our political people base is absent. So the talent poll (and the resulting talent) is that much smaller.
The Northern Territory does not have this problem, even though it, too, has a high proportion of public employees. This is because being a member or supporter of the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory is seen not only a socially acceptable, but socially and economically necessary to be on the inner circle.
So what has self-government done for us? It has given us a seat in the Council of Australian Governments (the Premiers’ conference) and a seat in every ministerial council. It enables our government to puts its case directly to the Australian Grants Commission and to the Productivity Commission’s inquiries into government services and competition policy.
Those forums determine a huge amount of policy and law that affect our lives – food labelling, speed limits, gun law, grants for health, education, welfare, police and so on, chemical bans and warnings, and dozen and dozens or other things from the great to the small. With no voice, the federal minister for territories would do the occasional catch up. There would be no chance for the ACT to contribute or lead.
A good example was this week’s extra $55 million from the Grants Commission. That was not a gift. It was achieved by the ACT Government working hard to prove its case. Indeed, it was a more sophisticated version of the old Bjelke-Petersen tactic of taking every grant and piece of program money the Feds under Whitlam had on offer.
No federal minister could have put such a case for extra ACT funding – he would have been laughed out of the Cabinet room.
Self-government also gives us the Assembly committee system at which citizens get the opportunity to put their views (whether they take it up or how well they present is another matter, but the structure is there). Question time and Assembly debate are also structures to question government and improve it.
Fortunately, the proportional representation system ensures the place is not swamped by one party (as it would inevitably have been with single-member electorates). The importance of proportional representation is as much to ensure the Opposition is of a reasonable size as to give independents and minor parties a chance. There is little wrong with having the Executive in a minority in the legislature. It has to persuade either the Opposition or some independents of the merits of its legislation while retain the huge powers given to the Executive in our quasi-Westminster system.
It is not perfect. But a lot of the imperfections come down not to the system itself but to the quality of the people (both in government and outside it, in the media and among voters) and the opportunities they take to improve public administration and the delivery of services.
With self-government the opportunities are there that would not be there with a territory run out of a federal minister’s office.
It is difficult to prove, but I think we have a better quality of life with self-government than if we have been ruled directly by a parsimonious government from Kirribilli in the past three years and under a down-sizing federal labor government before that.