Parliaments are among the fundamental institutions of Australian democracy (see Chapter 2). In this chapter, following on from arguments raised in Chapter 1, Uhr and Abjorensen suggest that the democratic law-making function of parliaments ought to be underpinned by principles of deliberation. This chapter also draws on wider theories of democracy (Chapter 1) and demonstrates the relevance of the approaches found in the ‘new institutionalism’ (see Chapter 2). The chapter, like most of those in this section of the book, challenges the view of many critical theorists that political institutions do not really count for much against the larger power structures embedded in Australian society (Chapter 4).

Parliaments are often derided as talking shops, but what they talk about tells us much about the political communities they represent. Members of parliament talk about many issues, particularly in relation to the three core parliamentary functions we emphasise in this chapter: political representation, law-making and government accountability. At their best, parliaments are deliberative assemblies, with members talking not just among themselves but with the citizens they represent, about laws to benefi t the community and ways of holding governments accountable.

Introduction

Considerations of systematic coverage apart, there are a number of reasons why a comparative study of the impact of federalism on the development of the welfare state might wish to dwell on the Australian case. Perhaps the most important is that the Australian case seems to exemplify all of the key hypotheses identified in the theoretical literature linking these phenomena. If the basic hypothesis linking federalism to the ‘old politics’ of the welfare state is that federal institutions hinder welfare state expansion, Australia appears to fit the bill rather well. With the exception of a decade or so of radical experimentation immediately after federation, the story of the Australian welfare state in the first half of the twentieth century is one of the late adoption of schemes increasingly common elsewhere and, after World War Two, of levels of expenditure that are consistently towards the bottom of international league tables.

Since the early 1980s, however, things appear to have changed. In the ‘silver age’ of welfare state development, Australia has been hailed as one of the few OECD countries to combine measurable success in economic performance with a significant improvement in welfare provision. On the surface, this seems to fit with the ‘new politics’ notion of federal institutions exercising a ‘ratchet effect’ on expenditure development, making it difficult for political forces opposed to statist intervention to obtain the leverage required to reverse existing policies.