Introduction

Localism is often used in confusing and contradictory ways in Australian political debate and policy discourse. While many state and territory governments extol the virtues of devolving responsibility for planning and service delivery down to local governments, they show no sign of relinquishing their constitutional authority over local government or of pressing for further devolution to more localised communities. State and territory governments continue to exercise their constitutional authority over local government in regulating their powers, responsibilities and finances, and, most symbolically, in enforcing the amalgamation of local councils in the name of efficiency and effectiveness, often in the face of staunch opposition from the councils concerned (Brown and Bellamy, 2006; Kembray, 2015; Sansom, 2015). While this may frame localism as the application of the subsidiarity principle in practice, it also reflects an increasingly complex system of multi-level governance based on a distinctive Australian system of federalism. This system does not yet give any constitutional recognition to local government, but it provokes considerable debate about overlapping responsibilities, bureaucratic duplication and cost-shifting. As most local governments in Australia cover relatively small populations, there is little or no political pressure for them to devolve powers and responsibilities to even more local levels, but this is not to say that they are not increasingly conscious of their statutory obligations and political commitments to develop more extensive and effective programmes of public participation and community engagement.

Paradoxically, while the colonial predecessors of the states and territories agreed to the formation of a federal Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and those state and territory governments now determine the nature of local government in their jurisdictions, there are growing calls to resolve many of the problems of three-tier federalism by abolishing the states and territories in the name of localism (Twomey and Withers, 2007). However, it is unlikely that such a radical reform will gain much political traction in the foreseeable future.

Among the challenges for advocates of localism in Australia are the problems of political and bureaucratic capacity in an extremely diverse pattern of local governments, the nature of relations between levels of government and between adjoining councils, and problems of scale in a very large country with a relatively small but spatially concentrated population.