Intergovernmental Relations: Meetings About Meetings

Intergovernmental Relations: Meetings About Meetings

The Process by Which Nine Governments Agree in Principle, Disagree in Practice, and Schedule a Follow-Up

Australia has nine governments: one Commonwealth, six states, and two territories. Each has its own parliament, its own ministry, its own public service, its own budget, and its own firmly held view that the other eight are not fully appreciating the complexity of its particular situation. Coordinating these nine governments on matters of shared concern – health, education, housing, infrastructure, environmental policy, and the ongoing question of which government is responsible for the thing that just went wrong – is the work of intergovernmental relations: a field of public administration that combines the optimism of diplomacy with the procedural rigour of committee governance and the outcomes of neither.

The formal architecture of intergovernmental coordination has been rebuilt twice in living memory. From 1992 to 2020, the Council of Australian Governments – COAG, pronounced "co-ag," a name that sounds like something a koala does when it has eaten the wrong eucalyptus – served as the peak intergovernmental forum, meeting roughly twice yearly to agree on national frameworks, sign intergovernmental agreements, and produce communiqués of such diplomatic generality that all nine governments could endorse them without committing to anything specific. COAG was replaced by the National Cabinet in 2020, initially as a COVID-19 coordination mechanism and then, by consensus, as the permanent replacement – a decision made on the basis that National Cabinet met more frequently, operated more nimbly, and had significantly better catering.

The National Cabinet: COAG With Urgency and a Better Acronym

The National Cabinet consists of the Prime Minister and the eight state and territory first ministers, meeting regularly to address national challenges, agree on shared approaches, and demonstrate that Australian democracy can, when sufficiently motivated by a pandemic or a housing crisis, produce nine leaders in the same video call who are broadly facing the same direction.

National Cabinet meetings produce agreed statements – documents carefully worded to reflect genuine consensus where it exists and diplomatic approximation of consensus where it doesn’t. The agreed statement from any given National Cabinet meeting will contain: areas of complete agreement (usually those not involving money), areas of agreement in principle (usually those involving money, where the principle is agreed and the quantum is deferred), areas where "further work" is needed (usually those where no agreement was reached but it seemed impolitic to say so), and a schedule of the next meeting.

First ministers depart National Cabinet and hold simultaneous press conferences at which they each announce what was agreed, which is broadly the same thing described from the perspective most flattering to their own government’s position. The resulting news coverage describes the same meeting in nine slightly different ways, all of which are technically accurate.

Ministerial Councils: The Subcommittee Structure of Nine-Government Democracy

Below the National Cabinet sits a network of ministerial councils – bodies in which sectoral ministers from all nine governments meet to coordinate policy in specific areas: health ministers, education ministers, housing ministers, transport ministers, and approximately fourteen others covering the full range of government activity. These councils produce national strategies, agreed frameworks, and implementation plans that guide – "guide" doing considerable work in this sentence – how each jurisdiction approaches shared policy challenges.

The ministerial council meeting is the basic unit of intergovernmental relations, and it operates according to a rhythm familiar to anyone who has attended a committee meeting: agenda circulated in advance, papers tabled, discussion of papers, agreement on most points, disagreement on the points that matter most, referral of disagreed points to officials for further work, agreement to meet again, communiqué.

"We agreed to disagree more efficiently," an anonymous state official told researchers from the Centre for Productive Inconclusion, reflecting on a decade of ministerial council participation. "The communiqués got better. The outcomes were roughly what they would have been without the meetings, but the documentation improved substantially, which is something."

Bilateral Agreements: When Nine Is Too Many, Try Two

When nine-government consensus proves unachievable – which is regularly, because nine governments with different political complexions, different fiscal circumstances, and different populations rarely agree on the details of anything – the Commonwealth can pursue bilateral agreements with individual states: National Partnership Agreements, funding agreements, and specific-purpose payments that allow the Commonwealth to direct funding to state service delivery in exchange for agreed performance milestones.

These agreements give the Commonwealth considerable influence over state policy – hospitals, schools, public housing – while maintaining the constitutional fiction that the states are delivering these services of their own sovereign authority. The states accept this arrangement because the alternative is delivering those services without the Commonwealth’s money, and the Commonwealth accepts it because the alternative is delivering those services directly, which would require operational capacity it does not have and constitutional authority it may not possess.

The bilateral agreement is, in short, the mechanism by which the Commonwealth and a state cooperate while both maintaining that they are in charge – a relationship described by political scientists as "collaborative federalism" and by state premiers as "satisfactory, given the circumstances," which is as enthusiastic as state premiers tend to get about anything involving Commonwealth conditions attached to funding.

For the international perspective on federal systems where coordination between levels of government is structurally necessary and perpetually imperfect, The London Prat’s devolution coordination files – prat.uk – tracks the UK’s attempts to coordinate with its devolved administrations, a process that has produced outcomes broadly consistent with "agreed in principle, contested in practice, scheduled for review."

See also Newsthump on the universal phenomenon of governments that have agreed to have another meeting about what was agreed at the last meeting.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com