Introduction

With the abandonment in 2016 of a major White Paper review process that had aimed to ‘relaunch the [Australian] federation' by delivering ‘a more rational system of government' (Abbott 2014), the prospects for systemic, significant reform of the Australian federal system now appear remote.

In the absence of substantial proposals or realistic prospects for major change in the short to medium term, incremental reform of Australia's federa­tion may depend on improvements to the mechanisms of intergovernmental cooperation that are such an intrinsic part of Australia's concurrent federal system. Such cooperation, or the lack of it, forms part of the spectacle and theatre of the political dimension of Australian federalism. Assessing the fed­eration's capacity to harness cooperative effort also requires us to look beyond intergovernmental relations, which are all about the politics, whether they be arguments over fiscal federalism and funding inadequacies or the spectacle of the Council of Australian Governments (coag). We also need to pay attention to intergovernmental management, the role of the bureaucracy in supporting the federal system; a part of the system that receives little attention but that underpins its operations.^[44]

As late as 1990, intergovernmental management as an object of study in its own right was still described as ‘embryonic' and ‘shallow', having ‘recently emerged in the literature’ (Marando and Florestano 1990, p.

As for Australia, little has changed over the quarter of a century since Yeatman expressed concern over the lack of focus on intergovernmental man­agement, which she attributed to a preoccupation with ‘coordinate’ views of federalism and the division of jurisdictional roles (Yeatman 1991, p. 43). Despite the broadening and deepening of the relationships between national and subnational governments that has taken place since the 1990s in Australia (Phillimore and Harwood 2015), only a handful of studies has explored the interface between public administration and federalism.

This limited research history may reflect the ‘pragmatic’ nature of Australian federalism, characterized by ‘a direct engagement or confronta­tion with pressing problems, an engagement unmediated by larger theoreti­cal concerns’ (Hollander and Patapan 2007). There is a distinctly instrumen­tal flavour to the small number of studies of intergovernmental management conducted to date: many of them aim not just to understand the nature of intergovernmental management in Australia, but to assess and enhance its effectiveness. Moreover, a review of the literature to date shows that, until very recently, research focused almost exclusively on officials in central agencies, not on those in line departments, and on the commonwealth gov­ernment, but not state jurisdictions. Finally, with the exception of the 2015 Future of Australian Federalism Survey (Smith and Brown 2017), there is no systematic research on practitioners’ attitudes towards federal arrangements generally, nor on the practice of intergovernmental management.

So, for all its importance to the health of Australian democracy and the everyday lives of Australians, the practice of intergovernmental management is poorly understood, and its capacities poorly assessed. As a result, we rarely consider the contribution that improving such capacities might make to the operations of the federal system overall. With these normative questions in mind, this chapter addresses the theoretical questions raised by the concepts of federal dynamics: what changes within federal systems, and what remains stable? Why does continuity often prevail over change, and, if systems do change, why do they change in particular ways, and how do they change in and over time, with respect to direction, pace, duration and scope (Benz and Broschek 2013)? The particular challenge for Australia's federation, to which the concept of federal dynamics draws attention, involves balancing the capacity to maintain institutional stability in the face of an unsettled and unclear policy environment, with the ability to change despite the inertia of ‘normal' politics and institutional stability, if not stasis (Thelen and Karcher 2013, p. 136).

William Anderson, an American academic involved in the late 1950s in the US Commission on Intergovernmental Relations argued, ‘It is human beings clothed with office who are the real determiners of what the relations between units of government will be' (quoted in Cho and Wright 2004, p. 451). Accordingly, I have adopted an institutionalist framework, looking particu­larly at the role concepts, ideas and cultures play in shaping the formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions of intergovernmental management. This approach corresponds with the ‘institutional' and ‘ide­ational' layers of federal dynamics theory. Benz and Broschek (2013) relate the former to the formal institutions and informal routines that establish and distribute authority relationships within and between jurisdictions and establish regular patterns of behaviour within those institutions. In line with Friedrich's approach to federalism as a composite body of congruent and divergent ideas (Burgess 2012, p. 150), they refer to the ideational layer of federations as ‘the normative or ideational constructs that actors employ in order to interpret their social and political environment' (Benz and Broschek 2013, pp. 5-7).

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