Book Review: Modern Federalism
| Author | L. F. Crisp |
| DOI | 10.1177/0067205X7600800108 |
| Published date | 01 March 1976 |
| Date | 01 March 1976 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
1976]
Book
Reviews 107
Modern Federalism by
GEOFFREY
SAWER.
(Pitman Australia, 1976,
2nd Edition), pp. i-vii, 1-170. Recommended retail price $5.50 (ISBN:
o85896 448
1).
This text has evidently had the success its broad and perceptive
conspectus deserved and here now, in avery presentable soft-cover
format,
is
apleasantly readable second edition.
It
is
essentially a
comparative study of the noteworthy features and tendencies of some
ten major federations with sidelong glances at some additional failing,
failed or "incipient" federal structures. Any such work needs herculean
labours to bring it up to
date-one
has only to think of our own
Commonwealth where succeeding Prime Ministers each have their
own "New Federalism", and of the whirl of events affecting
our
Federation between 1972 and the "coup and plebiscite" of November-
December 1975.
In
the additional case of the European Economic
Community,
as
"an
incipient federalism", Sawer
is
dealing with a
community as significantly changed in ascore of ways as it has been
enlarged since his first edition.
That
change and development alone,
with all its tangled skein and case-law, calls for tireless mastering
and distillation even for abrief treatment like the present.
Whilst Sawer must be judged by his control of aten-
or
twelve-ring
circus, most of us, in
our
parochial way, will no doubt
turn
first to his
treatment of the convention- and precedent-shattering antics of 1974-
1975, many of which are neatly packaged and presented in awider
perspective at pages 68-71.
"Never before in British Commonwealth history", Sawer emphasises,
after surveying the field, "had the Queen
or
her representative dis-
missed aChief Minister with aLower House majority solely because
of failure to get Supply through an Upper House". He goes on to stress
the Governor-General's further extraordinary course of action in
requiring the outcome of the dissolution he then granted the minority
Prime Minister of his personal choice
"to
be adouble dissolution
election, based not upon the activating disagreement about Supply
(since as to that the conditions of
s.
57 had not been satisfied) but
upon twenty-two other Bills as to which there had been the necessary
sustained deadlock" (engineered, Sawer might have added, largely by
the
man
who was now, as minority Prime Minister, to be handed on a
plate the electoral benefit of his obstructions; for, whether
or
not
so
intended by the Governor-General, his summary dismissal in the
overheated political circumstances of the crisis could not but penalise
heavily at the polls his peremptorily and autocratically discarded chief
adviser and endow his replacement with amost generous electoral
advantage). One can think of only one
or
two even vaguely compar-
able incidents at either level of government in the parliamentary
federalisms.
In
the same chapter, Sawer has slightly expanded his first-edition
comparison of Australian and American judicial treatment of the
important "common-market" motive for federation. The Holmesian
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