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On 1 January 2001, Australia celebrated the centenary of its federal Constitution. Throughout its history, the Australian federal system has proved both resilient and flexible, serving the Commonwealth through the trials of depression, total war, imperial decline, and economic reconstruction. The constitutional system has been developed through interpretation by the High Court and popular input via referendums, as well as by the ongoing process of intergovernmental relations. There has been an overall expansion of Commonwealth powers with the polities of nation-building, but the states remain significantly powerful although financially dependent on the common wealth. Given the institutional and popular success of Australian federalism, the challenges facing the Commonwealth in the new century are not expected to be domestic or constitutional, but strategic and economic: principally, how a smallish middle power should meet the difficulties of globalization and security from a position of relative isolation adj acent to Asia in the southern Pacific., Globalization is the major challenge facing Australian government in the twenty-first century. In the past, Australian federalism could be analyzed with little reference to the international stage because the Commonwealth [...]

James Bryce's analysis of American federalism made it possible for the Australian founders to reproduce federal institutions on the American model without replicating the republican and empirical ideas that underpinned them in the United States Constitution. Bryce's account in The American Commonwealth (1888) appealed to Australia's founders because it was suited to their needs. Bryce was English, and, like a sensible nineteenth-century Englishman, he argued that U. S. institutions had little to do with intellectual product. Instead, they were largely English institutions adapted to American purposes. Reading Bryce, Australia,s founders assumed that if federal institutions had little to do with abstract theory, and had simply been adapted to American circumstances, they might also be adapted to Australian circumstances. Thus, Bryce's approach to American federalism allowed Australia's founders to substitute their own colonial tradition of parliamentary democracy under the Crown for the republican principles o f rights and the separation of powers that underlie the U.S. Constitution., James Bryce's The American Commonwealth shaped the Australian founders' understanding of federalism. The novelty of Bryce's work was that it anglicized the United States Constitution for the Australian audience. Concentrating [...]

New governance arrangements for NHS Foundation Trusts (FTs) aimed to replace centralized state ownership of acute English hospitals with a new form of social ownership. Under this, trusts would exist as independent public interest organizations on the model of mutuals and co-operative societies. Assessing the impact of the new arrangements on the management structure of four acute hospitals, we demonstrate that FTs have failed to deliver social ownership and local accountability on this model. We suggest that policy-makers should re-frame the governance apparatus associated with mutualism and social ownership in terms of the concept of meta-regulation. By re-framing governors as meta-regulators, regulatory institutions would acquire new powers to steer FTs towards sustainable forms of compliance via non-coercive, non-intrusive means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, in Australia, gambling policy and regulation have been the sole responsibility of Australian State and Territory governments. However, in 1998-99 the Commonwealth commissioned an unprecedented national inquiry into gambling that was highly critical of existing gambling policies and regulatory regimes. The Productivity Commission proposed a 'blueprint' for an effective, independent gambling regulatory system. Seven years on, this article revisits Australian gambling regulation to present a contextualised account of regulatory reform in Victoria and New South Wales (NSW). It finds that that they have taken a markedly different approach to structural reform. Neither State has adopted the Productivity Commission's 'ideal' regulatory model. Reforms have been shaped by local circumstances and government priorities, rather than the regulatory principles and functions outlined by the Productivity Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]