| > Both Canada and Australia have strong federalism. About half of all expenditure is run through the state and local governments in the US. In Australia it’s similar, and in Canada it’s 75%. Just looking at who spends the money ignores some big differences. For example, unlike the US, Australia has a unified court and criminal justice system - the federal courts have jurisdiction to hear appeals even on purely state law questions; there are no federal prisons (federal prisoners serve their sentences in state prisons); outside of the military, almost all federal criminal trials happen in state courts (technically some federal courts have the jurisdiction to hold criminal trials, but that almost never happens-federal courts do try civil cases, but in criminal matters are effectively appellate only); state prosecutors can prosecute federal crimes and federal prosecutors can prosecute state crimes (common for federal prosecutors to add on lesser state charges and vice versa) Australia has institutions like the National Cabinet (council of heads of federal, state and territory governments) which have no parallel in the US-“cooperative federalism”. Formal agreements between the federal and state governments plays a big role in Australia’s federalism, lacks much of an equivalent in the US-e.g. Australia’s food safety system is governed by an agreement between Australia’s federal, state and territory governments, and also the national government of New Zealand. > The people have a lot to do with it too. Large-scale immigration of Germans, then Irish and Italians, and now Hispanics has left a long tradition of ethnic machine politics in the U.S. that’s simply absent from Canadian and Australian politics. Even as say distinct Italian or Irish identity has diminished, our politics, especially on the left, is still centered around identity Last time you made an argument like this, I pointed out it ignores the importance of figures like Daniel Mannix (Irish Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, 1917-1963) and B.A.Santamaria (Italian Catholic anti-communist activist; his height of political influence was in the 1950s) in Australia’s political history - between them those two men changed the outcome of more than one national election And as to Canada, this argument of yours ignores the existence of Quebec, and also the (lesser) role that Anglophone-Francophone conflict has played in the history of some other provinces (e.g. New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba) > What was his job before politics? He wasn’t a labor leader or anything like that. He was a community organizer in Chicago’s ethnic-based political machine. Ethnic-based political organising exists in Australia too. For example, both major parties have done a lot of work on wooing the Chinese-Australian community, which includes interacting with that community’s social clubs, doing political interviews in Chinese language media, sometimes even running candidates from that background, etc |
I’m not denying that immigrant groups were influential in Australia. But even today, 60% of Australia is English or “Australian” (which is mostly English). 80% are from the British Isles. By contrast, English are not even the plurality in most U.S. states: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_the_Unite.... Germans are the most common in the Midwest; Italians are the most common in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut; Mexicans are the most common in the southwest; etc.
That has led to a completely different political mentality, where for more than a century, the center-left party has largely been organized around mobilizing its ethnic factions to “turn out” to vote. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall.
Of course you’re correct that Canada has a similar problem: the British were actually the ones who took over and supplanted the French founding population. They agreed to split up the country and give the French a great deal of latitude to do their own thing. That has mitigated what otherwise would have created tremendous conflict.
You’re certainly seeing more of that in Canada and Australia now given the mass immigration from Asia. But in the US this is been happening for 170 years or so. We’ll see if Canada and Australia are still well functioning and efficient after Chinese and Indian ethnic politics becomes a major force.