Pragmatic federalism and Australia's new national health agencies

Abstract

This article examines the recent creation of Commonwealth semi-autonomous regulatory health agencies in the context of Australia�s pragmatic federal tradition. These (soft) regulatory agencies are novel to Australia�s historically fragmented federal health system, though they follow an apparent trend towards Commonwealth performance regulation of traditionally state/territory jurisdictional policies and functions. Following academic literature on the EU, the analysis here seeks to link notions of Australian pragmatic federalism with different types of multi-level governance. The Australian federal experience has long been plagued by the rival logics of Westminster and Federal institutions and it is argued that their amalgamation presents a continuum along which (pragmatic) intergovernmental arrangements can be characterized. This notion of a continuum is further conceptualized through the distinctions between performance regimes for (top down) accountability and performance regimes for learning. Key questions are how can Australia�s pragmatic federalism be characterized? And is there evidence of a deepening of Australia�s pragmatic federal traditions through the creation of these new regulatory agencies?