Introduction

Understanding policy analysis within state and territory governments (state governments hereafter) in Australia presents quite a challenge. State governments are part of a federation in which the Commonwealth government is fiscally dominant and has greatly expanded its policy ambition and reach over the past century. As a result, many areas of government activity that were previously the sole preserve of state governments have become concurrent areas of policy formulation and implementation (Fenna, 2012). This involves bilateral and multilateral negotiations and relations between state and Commonwealth leaders, ministers and officials. Determining the precise role of states individually or collectively in such shared policy areas is inherently difficult.

Relatedly, intergovernmental relations (IGR) are ‘notoriously opaque’ (Painter, 1998, p 71) and generally resistant to study, and, as a consequence, they have been neglected relative to the fiscal and judicial dimensions of federal systems. This is particularly true of Australian federalism. There have been very few detailed studies of the inner workings of intergovernmental institutions such as ministerial councils (one exception is Jones, 2008) or even the better-known peak bodies such as the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).

Separately, there has unfortunately been little analysis or even description of policy processes within state governments over the past 15 years, beyond the comparative work of Galligan (1986, 1988), Birrell (1987), Painter (1987), Peachment (1995) and Spoehr and Broomhill (1995) and state-specific studies (eg Davis, 1995; Costar and Economou, 1999; Spoehr, 1999, 2005, 2009, 2013; Crowley, 2012). Australia is not unique in this relative lack of focus on sub-national governments (on Canada, see, eg, McArthur, 2007, pp 238–9). This absence of attention to state-level policy can be explained by a combination of factors. First, many of the trends at sub-national level – in particular, the introduction of New Public Management (NPM), the rise of central agencies (Halligan and Power, 1992) and the turn towards market approaches – have also occurred at the national level, which has tended to receive most attention. Second, the centralisation trend in Australian federalism has naturally led to a focus on the federal government, a fact made more understandable in light of the introduction of competition and regulatory harmonisation processes that have served to reduce the differences in government policy and practices between the states.