As one of the older, stable federations, Australia can appear to hold lessons for countries seeking durable forms of political decentralisation. This is especially the case if one considers the “lucky” social and economic fortunes that most Australians have enjoyed, as a colonial and post-colonial country in which democratic innovation became a hallmark of political development at the state-regional level—that is, the colonies—from as early as the 1850s, when the country’s political context was the British Empire. Along with greater in-dependence, Federation in 1901 brought, to a large degree, a classic “compact” between the elected leaders of six democratically-functioning colonies, who used popular political engagement to generate a momentum for change. This “utopian moment” reflected and confirmed the colonists’ national conscious-ness but also their pragmatic outlook—and the political impossibility, in the eyes of most citizens and their representatives, of the new “Australia” reverting to a centralised, British-style unitary system even if it was to remain British in every other possible respect (Irving 1999; Galligan 1995).