I want to get rid of state governments. So what would that look like?

The rest of us can blame the British says AJ Brown, professor of public policy and law at Griffith University and the full bottle on how we feel about our constitution.

Yes, it's the Brits' fault we have three levels of government - first the states, then the federation - and as a weak afterthought, local government.

"We were probably the first colonised country in the world, maybe the first country in the world, to actually have a federal system whose genesis was actually to be a system with at least two levels and and probably three levels."

But if we were to sit down today and redesign it, what would that look like?

My secret fantasy has always been to get rid of state governments and just have a federal government with beefed-up local governments.

Hold your horses right there, says Brown. His research shows over 16 years that while there was once a belief the feds would just step up and sort everything, "It is now less clear citizens have any level of government in which to place solid confidence."

Brown says the idea what we are over-governed is a myth. Local government is still weak in this country in comparison to most of the countries with which we compare ourselves to, in contrast to say the United States or Canada.

Here, says Brown, local government is just underpowered and underfunded and has a much less significant role in the lives of communities and in economic development and in social services than in many, many other countries.

"The reality is that we are not over-governed. We're actually under-governed at a local and regional level, typically in most parts of Australia, by comparison to most countries, really, other than highly centralised, small European countries.

The states have a truck load of constitutional power but they struggle with resourcing because it's the federal government that has almost complete control over raising taxes and collecting money.

"These are the really big imbalances in the system, and that's really the cause of most of our problems. It leads to confusion or overlap or duplication and [systems] not working well, " says Brown.

Yep. And we all wonder whether there's anyone actually looking after a problem properly. Cough, education. Cough, health. Looking at you two right there.

There's been little change to our federal system since federation - and it's pretty unlikely we will get much anyhow. You can see we are terrified of change.

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Mark Chou, an expert in local government and an associate professor in the Department of Policy and Governance at ANU's Crawford School, says Australia's a bit of a frozen continent. We might think we want change but we aren't doing anything about it.

"What we have we'll likely to continue to have for the foreseeable future," says Chou.

Occasionally we will take a bold step - or a politician will. When we needed to have that bold step - national concerted co-ordination - during the pandemic, a bunch of people you would never have thought could get on with each other, did just that. A Coalition prime minister. A bunch of bolshy premiers and chief ministers. The national cabinet showed us just what was possible.

As Chou puts it: "The national cabinet became a necessity to co-ordinate federal with state with local actions in an efficient and speedy manner." And it did.

Which is not to say we could really do away with local government.

Sure, says Chou, state governments could arguably carry out much of what local governments do now. But if they did, we would have decisions not made based on what locals need.

And communities need local decisions. Chou says those local decisions encourage locals to participate. And remote decision-making would almost certainly ensure rural and regional Australia gets forgotten. Again. Sure state and territory representatives of those areas do their best but as Chou says, "local councils, in practice, are often the only tier of government there on the ground - ensuring the services people need are met in a timely fashion."

Like Brown's research, Chou's work also shows that Australians want their local governments to do more: tackle big issues like climate change and Indigenous reconciliation at the local level. When state and federal governments seems unwilling to act, local authorities should step up.

"Instead of fewer tiers of governments, the push should be to better recognise and fund lower tiers of government, says Chou.

So it's really hard to know the answer for what would be the best system if we were to sit down and redesign it better today.

Want to get rid of the states? Brown warns we must be careful what we wish for. He backs up Chou's view that the further removed government is from its citizens, the less likely it is to really get what citizens want and need.

And here's the real surprise. Remember I said Brown has been researching this area for nearly two decades. Well, it turns out that what we really want is four levels of government. Federal. State. Regional. Local.

Yep, what we want is four tiers. I'm exhausted by the thought of it.

We don't want to throw away anything we have got now. We want the states to stand up for us against the federal government and then we want governments to stand up for our regions, for our localities, for our suburbs. Our big cities crave more structure and so do those big complex regions - Gippsland, central Queensland.

"The interesting thing about that is that it reinforces that these structures do matter to people. People do see sometimes really clearly what's not working in the system, and they do think about it. And the interesting challenge is that is then how to count all that thinking is to try to make the system work better."

And that is a challenge for all of us.