Democracy, Capitalism and the Westminster System: Royal Commissions and Reforming Modern Australian Government

ABSTRACT The ‘Westminster system’ is commonly used as a descriptor of Australian political institutions. This article instead traces its emergence as a political language for debating the adequacy of modern Australian government as the relationship between democracy and capitalism changed in the half century after World War II. From the late 1960s, and particularly through royal commissions in the 1970s and 1980s, Westminster became a way of diagnosing those constitutional and administrative features requiring reform to meet the challenges of governing the post‐war welfare and capitalist state. The CoombsRoyal Commission into Australian Government Administration challenged traditional ministerial responsibility and proposed ‘accountable management’ as a means of making government more capable and responsive to an increasingly complex democratic society. The Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland and WA Inc. Royal Commission in Western Australia subsequently debated whether Westminster relationships between ministers, officials and Parliament remained adequate to check patterns of corruption in the post‐war state‐managed capitalist economy or needed supplementing with the institutions of a new administrative law. The article argues that two reforms later associated with neoliberal government—managerialism and the regulatory state—originated in these distinct attempts to repair the perceived deficiencies of Westminster, as elements of accountable management and new administrative law were later repurposed to support market‐oriented reform. This history complicates accounts of Australia's transition to neoliberalism as a straightforward displacement of the post‐war order, by recovering instead an open‐ended and ongoing configuration of the relationship between democracy, capitalism and government.