New Australian states

Do we get a population influx at some point to support some of these new states? That's the primary sticking point right there, especially in the north and west.

That having been said, I would love to see us get married to New Zealand, even if North and South Islands came in separately. Very pretty they are. :p
 
Read the article and laughed when I came to New Zealand.

If that ever happened, a union between Australia and New Zealand, the small number of New Zealanders who supported it would be considered traitors. I can definately see some kind of violent conflict rising in the midst of a union there, and in the muck of it all, the various extremist groups would probably take their chances and stage multiple coups against the parliamentary democracy we already have as well as each other. The New Zealand National Front would most definately try something, as they are already trying to set up an independent nation within New Zealand that is free of anyone except Christian whites (or whites in general, tbh I couldn't care less about the NZNF). The smaller groups like the New Zealand communists and all that would probably wriggle up in some way as well.

All in all I can see this event being catastrophic for New Zealand. As for Australia, they would probably welcome the flow of new people to they can oppress. New Zealanders would probably become the ethnic minority within the Greater Australia, as the Aborigines have been and still are in many places, except maybe to a lesser extreme. The thing is, Australia would end up being somewhat of a Pacific Yugoslavia, especially if they absorbed Timor L'Este and New Guinea as well. Eventually it would be forced into dissolution, depending on the POD. This whole post is assuming this happens recently, i.e. tomorrow or the next day, etc. Way back when, when we were all "British", such a union (such as the New South Wales-New Zealdand union) wouldn't have been met with so much resistance. I know a couple of Australians who actually think New Zealand is Australian and were surprised when they came to visit that they had to come into a massive international terminal and go through major customs and all that. These same Australians think that Tasmania is a separate country, and that Australia is a republic.

I think it would be a shotgun wedding, if NZ and Oz got married. With Oz's daddy holding the shotgun and NZ wanting to commit suicide soon after.
 
Papua New Guinea would be quite possible.

Maybe if Whitlam isn't elected and doesn't grant independance, the territory could become more closely linked with Queensland. Sir Joh would like to have influence over the mines there.
jaby2.gif
The old boy wasn't above conducting his own foreign policy, such as:
29th January 1985, Foreign policy in chocolate.
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On the 28th of January Joh impounded a shipment of New Zealand chocolates using a little used state rule that the import should bear the maker's name and address, hitting back at New Zealand's ban on U.S. war-ships that might be carrying nuclear weapons.

Opposition Leader Andrew Peacock believed Sir Joh's action was unwarranted and that dealings with NZ should be at Federal Government level. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden said that Sir Joh was making a clown of himself and his state...' Sir Joh had said that New Zealand was the weak link in the Anzus treaty'. Prime Minister of Australia was Bob Hawke.
 
General points would be:

1. Do the states mean the same thing as they do in OTL?
2. Cost will be an issue - the states/colonies often had significant financial insecurity, which was one push towards federation in Australia and the abolishment of the Provinces in NZ. Smaller or more states would have worse issues. The Wiki list seems to think that a lot of the proposed states have no bearing in reality.
3. When would these states happen?

Regarding the point about NZ joining Australia - it would depend when this happened. I think it would have been perfectly possible for what is NZ to have been incorporated into an Australian federation of some kind prior to WW1. Obviously the longer the separation the less likely it will be.

But perhaps if we had a POD where federation was pushed heavily earlier - say 1860s/70s then it might be possible - as that would predate a lot of the issues that stopped NZ joining in the first place - that being 1) a NZ national identity and possibly 2) the political centralisation of NZ on Wellington. By the time Federation was seriously discussed NZ had had about 25 years or so of being a centralised state with all that entails.

If you were to want this to happen post WW2 then I think it rather unlikely based on the Australian Federation. You would need some serious disaster or other POD to make this attractive to NZ at least.

Something less like a nation state though could be achieved, on the basis that there are reasonably close economic and legislative relationships. If you could create formal institutions of association early enough, say pre decolonisation, then the newly decolonised states like Samoa or the various smaller Pacific Islands probably would be initially absorbed into those.

Larger states like PNG would not work - for two reasons - cost and racism. The former would be that to have a very large, very poor state full of millions citizens in a federation would place an unacceptable strain on the rest of the federation. So while they might accept it as a dependency or colony with all that entails they would refuse equality. A huge sudden influx of non white/non Anglo citizens would be totally ASB pre the 1990s and even probably past that point.

Regarding NZ's nationalism as a barrier - yes, a lot of us hate the idea of "joining Australia" but I don't think that is a barrier to other closer forms of association. There are a lot of us in NZ that have close family in Australia and who have worked or holidayed there, and whom I am sure would accept closer association so long as it preserves some form of NZ sovereignty. Hell, if the nations of Western and Central Europe can do it after all their history then I dont' see why we couldn't, given we like each other a lot, have long history of cooperation and association, share the same language/societal structures and are dominated by Anglo /English speaking Europeans.

I do not for one minute think that this would start National Front rebellions or anything even close to that, although perhaps if you could get some sort of Left Wing Federal Dictatorship that invaded that might become a possibility. To think that NZers would become sort of new oppressed ethnic minority would also be unlikely - most Kiwis I know that live in Australia seem to happily fit in and be identified as locals if they want to be. My cousins who have grown up there seem to be accepted as Australian as the next. All of this speculation is pretty ASB so far as I am concerned
 
Papua New Guinea would be quite possible.

Maybe if Whitlam isn't elected and doesn't grant independance, the territory could become more closely linked with Queensland.

That's pretty interesting. PNG's population today is six million, with Australia's at 21 million. Quite a big voting bloc, though it'd likely take some time to get voting rights.

How would conflict with Indonesia over its aims at Western Papua play out?

I'm also interested the more recent proposal of an aboriginal state. Where would it likely have been?
 
Wasn't there a proposal once to divide Australia into something like 20 or 30 provinces including Papua New Guinea?
 
I could see a combination of NZ and Australia leading to a Greater Australia, and perhaps bringing in Papua New Guinea into the group before WWII. With the end of the war and irritation of Irian Jaya I wonder if the Dutch might not consider selling it to Australia as well, and Fiji might become a protectorate or even a state under the system. They might also seek to incorporate East Timor under the system with the withdrawl of the Portugese. That would give Canberra 9-11 states and a territory or two along with some interesting dynamics.

In a more modern system NZ and Australia seem to be coming closer to some sort of union over the next 10-20 years but I doubt that it would grow much bigger than that. I would think each of the Zealand islands would be their own state. Fiji might become a protectorate, but I doubt Papua New Guinea or East Timor would seek to join.
 
It's possible to integrate New Zealand into Australia, but you'd have to do it well before WWI. New Zealand's statehood was entered into the acts which formed the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, but it never came to be. One could, fairly easily with that POD, make both the North Island and South Island states, which would give NZ considerably influence over Australia.

That could have a massive shift in Australia's aboriginial policies, too, because now the Maori are now Australians, and NZ did a good job over the decades integrated the Maori into New Zealand's society, certainly a better job than Australia has done with its own aboriginals.

Integrating East Timor and Papua New Guinea is harder, simply because of the geographic differences and the political leanings of the Whitlam government, but if you can change those, you could easily just have Papua and East Timor Integrated fully into Australia in 1974-75 easily enough.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_Australian_States

WI any or all of the proposed new Australian states mentioned in the above article had actually come to fruition ? WI esp some of the more interesting proposals, such as PNG or East Timor becoming part of Australia as new states, had somehow come to pass ?

Most of those proposals Wiki lists were from the colonial era, so they aren't really 'new states' as per Chapter VI of the constitution.

I'm surprised the Far North Queensland movement is conflated with the Central Queensland statehood push (Gladstone & Rockampton). I don't think they were the same--we're talking about two separate regions hundreds of kms apart. The first Labour-Radical premier of Queensland, Kidston, was originally a Gladstone-based Central coast independence suporter. I doubt he had Townville or Cairns behind him.

Now this really surprises me:

During the process of Portuguese decolonisation in East Timor in 1974, a political party was formed called ADITLA Associação Democrática para a Integração de Timor Leste na Austrália or Democratic Association for the Integration of East Timor into Australia, by local businessman Henrique Pereira. It found some support from the ethnic Chinese community, fearful of independence or integration with Indonesia, but was disbanded when the Australian government rejected the idea in 1975.

Anyway, there's no way a majority non-white East Timor or PNG would ever have been allowed into the Commonwealth, not during the era of White Australia or even after.

Puerto Rico is much more integrated into the US and it hasn't become a state (though they've been given some type of choice, at least).
 
Integrating East Timor and Papua New Guinea is harder, simply because of the geographic differences and the political leanings of the Whitlam government, but if you can change those, you could easily just have Papua and East Timor Integrated fully into Australia in 1974-75 easily enough.

Whitlamism was the least of the obstructions stopping PNG or East Timor from becoming states.

Try every political development in Australia since the beginning of the end of transportation in the 19th century, for starters.
 
One thing that doesn't get much investigation in this kind of question is the proposed NZ states, assuming NZ could be convinced into the federation. While the simplest answer would be to split into to, North/South, I don't know if that would really work.

NZ doesn't really have identities firmly focused on island of birth/location. Local identity in my experience tends to be more about city or province, even though the latter have had little governmental/administrative significance for a century. You might be able to form such an identity/administrative unit on the South Island if you really wanted to do so, but it would be very much an artifical creation.

The North Island would be more difficult. The population is much higher and there are many more large (by our standards anyway) cities - each with pretty distinct identities too. Where would the capital be? Wellington is the current one and the natural choice, but Auckland (being 3x the size) would have a good claim if there was to be some sort of reorganisation mooted. It could get very messy. Back home right now they are going through the early stages of a re-organisation of how Auckland is governed and it is getting rather messy/fraught. I would hate to think how it would end up if it related to the whole island
 
I'm also interested the more recent proposal of an aboriginal state. Where would it likely have been?
Middle of nowhere. Not in Queensland, or Western Australia, to much coal, gas, maybe oil etc that it would be in the way. Probably Northern Territory/northern South Australia where most of them live there anyway. Anyway, the Aboriginals don't want a state because it would mean they can't blame the federal/existing state governments and or the white/non aboriginal community for all the problems.

That's pretty interesting. PNG's population today is six million, with Australia's at 21 million. Quite a big voting bloc, though it'd likely take some time to get voting rights.

How would conflict with Indonesia over its aims at Western Papua play out?
Around the 1960s probably. Most of the islands are probably incorporated into Queensland, whilst PNG proper has its own administration in Port Morseby. Might see a unicameral body like QLD, since QLD would be a big influence on it. Also probably see a significant white population in PNG and a big PNG population in northern Queensland due to better work oppurtunities (cane, mining, tourism).

Depends. Pretty much all Australian governments were content to let Indonesia do what it wanted, as long as direct Australian interests weren't harmed. However, since the Northern-Air/Sea gap now has a land border, the ADF will likely be more diverse between Air, Navy and Land.
 
Depending on when it happens, PNG may be one state or several - you have the original British/Australian colony, plus the German colony seized during WW1, and then the associated islands. If these administrations are kept seperate rather than unified, they wouldn't constitute the same kind of voting bloc. If we'd moved with the intention of incorporating PNG in the post-WW2 era rather than with the intention of granting independence, you may have a different situation.
 
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