Congress Speech - John Fowler

Good Afternoon and thank you for the invitation to speak. I have followed the Beyond Federation group and the 'Shed a Tier Conferences' that have been held and congratulate all who have kept this issue in debate. Your saint like commitment to these issues must demonstrate the gravity of our situation.

I wonder if as a child you wrote your name and listed all your locations; house or street, town, city/state, country, world, universe. As we grow we all create our own mental maps' of where we are, it also is part of that process of developing self and social identity.

As a child, I made a map of the valley I grew up in, natural delineators of rivers and hills and trees and house. As we grow we zoom out of our first map and created new boundaries, of social and lastly political boundaries. If I were to make a three dimensional map of that valley today it is criss-crossed by dotted lines of jurisdictions. Here are just a few.

If you take a helicopter ride in your mind you pass through a scaffold that is increasingly unsustainable. Three LGAs so three LEPs (or in one LGA One over 130 EPIs, 4 State electorates, a catchment authority, One catchment management Authority, numerous Sate Plans, State Authorities, a Rural Fire Service, All the bureaucracies of a state government and then again over that three federal electorates one of which stretches to Yass. I would contend that this century old scaffold of legislation and regulations; accountable only sometimes to elected members, is now such a maze of jurisdictions that it is not adapted to the issues of our time and WILL eventually fail us.

In 1901, we became one nation as far as the mapmakers were concerned. But a hundred years later we still have no national agreement on land, environmental management or planning, let alone industrial relations

Only recently, we examined the issue of how we govern ourselves in the Republican Debate This was not about good government, but skewed the issue to crown or no crown. It was about what was above the constitution, ie the crown, not the constitution itself. The crown is only symbol of our common wealth, if you will. And it is the modern challenge to find a form of government that will sustain and enhance our modern commons, the air, the earth and water. We do not have a sustainable constitution. And that should be the issue for policy makers and us, the citizens.

As many know the Australian constitution states that each seat, in the House of Representatives, must be created WITHIN EACH STATE, and must have a value that ensures one elector one vote within the state, not between states.

There is the stipulation in the Australian Constitution that there will always be 5 seats in the House of Representatives for the island of Tasmania, most with around only 70,000 electors compared to the seats of Calare or Sydney which have around 90,000 electors.

Consider an elected member for the Federal seat of Farrar an electorate on the NSW side of the Murray, s/he will represent an area that goes from Tumbarumba in the Snowies to near Echuca in the Murray flood plains. In contrast the seats like Indi, across the border in Victoria, have a north south axis and are an area that has a community interest around the townships of the slopes and valleys of the upper Murray valley. Different boundaries that ignore the natural and therefore social catchments.

Another example of unequal representation is the two seats in the ACT, Fraser and Canberra. Yet it is surrounded on the east by the seat of Eden-Monaro with 20,000 less electors, and over 9 times the area. To the north Hume which stretches to outer Sydney. The area for electoral representation does not match the environmental footprint of Canberra as an urban area, so cannot meet the best governance of that environmental footprint or catchment of that economic activity centre ie Canberra. The management of a severe bushfires tells us tragically that we have not adapted our governance to the severity of weather events that may well be a feature of our immediate future.

Federation must be revisited, initially, at the least to remove this stipulation if the House of Representatives is to be a democratic house where each electors vote is equally represented. If this amendment to the constitution were agreed to by the political parties, a referendum would have a greater chance of success.

From my experience, 1989-2003, in local government I believe that good governance is going backwards. There is still no constitutional recognition of local government. This at a time when we should be devising a framework or regional governments based on our geography, not our history.

Local government can deliver environmental and socially sustainable solutions when there is the means to meet a budgetary bottom line. The success of some of Regional Organisation of Councils is testament to this. This delivery of sustainable government must be done at a local level. I believe it was this immediacy and trust in local opinion makers that helped the distant and isolated rural or urban communities to vote 'Yes' for the third Federation referendum in 1899.

If it's a tough problem for the legislature like brothels give it's a job for local government. It was local government; especially the older councils, which took the risk to establish the early electricity and water boards to ensure, clean water and power to the rapidly urbanizing communities. Their social and physical capital had been used to develop these towns and their infrastructure since their incorporation in the 1870s. Hence the opinions of these developers of social capital would have been well respected. A respect that is not given to more than a few politicians today.

At Federation Maitland, Penrith and Tamworth, as well as Sydney, each had supplied electricity for public and private consumption. Successive State governments regardless, of their colour have stripped councils of power, utilities and their assets. It was the local governance that delivered safe and clean environments, not the metropolitan based agents of a colonial governance

Today our concern at global climate issues can be seen through comments in the press by academics and bureaucrats on Sydney's future water transport and other needs. The future comes at us either because of, and regardless to the past. If climate change is our future, we need better systems of governance than the adhocracy we can see today in the management of the governance of telecommunications and biotechnology.

I would like to share with you a quote from one of the few Prime Ministers to be seen as an Australian nationalist. He, I would suggest was the last PM who actually believed in local democracy. He shares experience in local government with Ben Chifley, they were not creatures of their political party, but went to the national parliament from local government. He was speaking in April 1946 as a councillor in country Victoria as a man who had lost many of his generation. He spoke of their sacrifice.

It was not wasted. We retained a system of government in which we, the people, choose our governors, dismiss them when we wish, and have a voice in our own destiny. ……We believed those principles were worth defending, not because in themselves they provided all that could be desired for human happiness, but because we believed that we could only advance to a full and satisfying life for all if we retained the freedom on which to build.

A foundation is not a house; but without a foundation you cannot build an enduring structure. That we have retained this foundation is the answer to those who claim the war was futile.(quoted in Hancock: 2001, Gorton, MUP)

I will always contend that local government is the origin of democracy in Australia and that the principle of the right to defend your belief in the common, was a foundation of the English revolution well before the establishment of the United Kingdom in 1701.

For democracy to work those within it must assume an ownership of decisions that will affect all. Too often government bureaucracy has “in their wisdom” made decisions FOR people not WITH people. Or governors express their inability to act because the decision or responsibility (sic) is at another level of government. There is only so long you can excuse your inaction because someone else ought to do it.

All invitations at Federation used Australian motifs of native plants and animals. They were used these to symbolize a 'native' democracy.

In Melbourne, the City of Port Phillip, a Local Government Area is very similar to South Sydney, the small local communities that set up their local government in the 19^th century were amalgamated by state government.

As in any restructure, traditional symbols of locality and place were being thrown out while graphic designers in public relations companies were replacing symbols of place by squiggles and blobs.

However, the three mayors' chairs from the councils combined to make Port Phillip, were placed in the chamber. Each mayor's chair demonstrates something of these local communities and their origins whether utilitarian port workers, dissenting low church artisans or florid bourgeois their symbols of local democracy represented by the mayoral chairs are in the chamber for all to see.

The symbols of our Australian democracy are alive, and reinterpreted like the wattle worn to remember the dead in Bali. It is a symbol of us. I think it is time that we remember that our other national symbols, the kangaroo and the emu cannot walk backwards.

No one can convince me of the worth of continuing with that current increasingly wasteful system of our federal arrangement.

The state governments impede good environmentally based local sustainable government. Amalgamation and regional agglomeration is the only development that local government can make to balance the legislative might of the state government. Inevitably I would hope that the functions of the state can be devolved to the regional level with representation in a house of review and a national assembly based on one vote one value.

All citizens want accountable politicians. Politicians accountable to their communities first, not political parties, not business, bureaucracies or state corporate monopolies, but you, me and the guys/blokes next door, all of us.