In 2019, a Canberra woman dying of motor neurone disease asked her local MLA a simple question: could the ACT government pass a law letting her choose the timing of her own death, the way Victorians had been able to since mid-2019. The honest answer was no — not because the Legislative Assembly disagreed, but because it was not allowed to try. Since 1997, an ordinary Act of the Commonwealth Parliament had stripped Canberra's own elected government of the power even to debate the subject, a power every state parliament in the country still held. She died, like thousands of terminally ill Canberrans over the next quarter-century, in a jurisdiction where the law could change everywhere else in Australia except where she actually lived — not through any failure of her own government, but because that government's lawmaking power was, on this and any other subject the Commonwealth chooses, only ever on loan.
A borrowed power, revoked and partly restored
Under section 122 of the Constitution, the Commonwealth Parliament has plenary power to make laws for the territories. It delegated day-to-day lawmaking to Canberra's own elected government under the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 (Cth), which commenced on 11 May 1989 and created the unicameral Legislative Assembly the ACT still has today. That power was never constitutionally guaranteed the way a state's is: the Commonwealth kept the ability to override or amend any ACT law, and in 1997 it used it. The Euthanasia Laws Act 1997 (Cth), a private member's bill introduced by Liberal backbencher Kevin Andrews, passed the House of Representatives 88–35 in December 1996 and the Senate 38–33 in March 1997. It overrode the Northern Territory's Rights of the Terminally Ill Act 1995 — the world's first voluntary euthanasia law — and amended both the ACT's and the NT's self-government Acts to bar either territory legislature from ever revisiting the subject.
That bar stood for 25 years while ACT Chief Ministers, federal ACT parliamentarians and Territory allies in the NT campaigned publicly for its repeal, arguing Canberrans deserved the same right every state resident already had to debate assisted dying through their own parliament. The Restoring Territory Rights Act 2022 (Cth), a private member's bill, passed the House of Representatives 99–37 on 3 August 2022 and the Senate on 1 December 2022 after a second-reading vote of 41–25, receiving royal assent on 13 December 2022. It repealed the euthanasia prohibition in both territories' self-government Acts — it did not itself legalise voluntary assisted dying, and it left the Commonwealth's broader override power over every other ACT law untouched. The ACT Government then built its own scheme: the Legislative Assembly passed the Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2024 on 5 June 2024, and it commenced on 3 November 2025, making Canberra the last Australian jurisdiction to offer lawful access — nearly three years after the Commonwealth bar was lifted, and eight years after Victoria became the first state to legislate.
The strongest case
A government that has run a state's business for 36 years — and won its rights back the democratic way
The self-government-maturity case rests on a genuine record. Since 11 May 1989, the ACT Legislative Assembly — just 25 members, uniquely combining the functions of a state parliament and Canberra's only local council, since the city has no separate municipal government — has run hospitals, schools, policing contracts, roads, planning and waste collection for a population that has grown to around 470,000 (approx.) (ACT Treasury, Estimated Resident Population, December quarter 2025), without the economies of scale a full state enjoys. The relationship has also matured in the territory's favour over time. In November 2011 the Commonwealth Parliament removed the Governor-General's unilateral power to disallow or rewrite an ACT law — a power exercised only once, against the ACT's Civil Unions Act 2006 — and replaced it with a requirement that a majority of both Houses of the federal Parliament vote to override a territory law. That is a higher, more transparent bar than existed before, and it reflects a Commonwealth that has, on balance, stepped back rather than forward over the past three decades.
And when the government judged the euthanasia bar unjust, it did not need a constitutional amendment or a court case to fix it — it campaigned, in the ordinary way democracies correct bad laws, for 25 years, through elected representatives, until the Restoring Territory Rights Act passed in December 2022. It then designed, legislated and delivered a working voluntary assisted dying scheme within 18 months, commencing on 3 November 2025 (ACT Legislation Register) — a complete pipeline from public advocacy to a functioning service, run by an Assembly some critics once dismissed as too small to be trusted with the job.
The evidence
The maturity case is strongest on process — the ACT can clearly run complex services and win political fights it takes seriously. It is weakest on structure, because two of the foundations self-government actually sits on are not things the territory controls.
The workforce figure is the most exposed to decisions the ACT does not make. The number of federal Australian Public Service employees based in Canberra rose from 68,257 in 2024 to 70,221 in 2025, but as a share of a national APS workforce that reached 198,529 at 30 June 2025, Canberra's slice has now fallen three years running — from 38 per cent in 2023, to 37 per cent in 2024, to 35 per cent in 2025, the lowest share since 2006 — as the Commonwealth deliberately places more roles in other capitals and regional centres for reasons entirely its own (APSC, State of the Service Report 2024–25).
The revenue figure is nearly as exposed. On the ACT's own 2025–26 Budget Papers, own-source taxation supplies 34 per cent of general government revenue and other own-source revenue a further 22 per cent, but GST payments (25 per cent) and Commonwealth grants (20 per cent) together account for roughly 45 per cent (approx.) — a figure the ACT does not set. GST is distributed between the states and territories on relativities recalculated annually by the Commonwealth Grants Commission, a process the ACT participates in but does not control; in 2023–24 the territory received $1.83 billion in GST revenue, a 2.1 per cent share of the $86.24 billion national pool (Commonwealth Grants Commission data, reported by the Canberra Times, 2023). Forward estimates in the ACT's own Budget Papers show the grants side of that dependence deepening rather than easing, with Commonwealth grants — $550 million of it recurrent health funding, $152 million capital — adding a further $702 million to the territory's revenue base between 2025–26 and 2028–29.
Self-government gave Canberra its own Parliament. It never gave Canberra its own money, or a guaranteed share of its own workforce.
The critique
The Restoring Territory Rights Act was a genuine win, but it fixed one historical wrong, not the general problem. The Commonwealth's power to override any ACT law remains fully intact under section 122 of the Constitution and the self-government Act itself; the 2011 reform made overriding a law procedurally harder — a floor vote in both Houses instead of an executive stroke of a pen — but it did not remove the power, and it requires no referendum and no special majority, unlike any change to a state's constitutional status. That the power is still live, not theoretical, was demonstrated again on 19 October 2023, when the Senate voted down a private senator's bill from Michaelia Cash to override the ACT's separate drug-decriminalisation law by 33 votes to 27 — a six-vote margin, on a different subject, in a Senate that could plausibly return a different result on a different day.
Statehood, the theoretical fix for that exposure, is not genuinely on the table, and the government has been candid about why. Chief Minister Andrew Barr has said he will not pursue it, and the ACT's own Solicitor-General has advised that statehood is "conventionally regarded as unavailable" to the territory because section 125 of the Constitution requires the seat of government to remain a territory vested in the Commonwealth, not a state. What the ACT actually campaigns for, and occasionally wins, is narrower: specific rights restored one issue at a time, as happened with voluntary assisted dying. That approach can accumulate, but by its nature it can never add up to the entrenched protection a state's status provides, because each fix remains only an ordinary Act away from being undone by a future Parliament.
The territory's practical self-government has limits beyond the override power, too. Central Canberra runs on two planning systems, not one: the National Capital Authority, a Commonwealth statutory body, administers the National Capital Plan over "National Land" — the Parliamentary Triangle, the lake foreshores, the capital's ceremonial approach roads — under the Australian Capital Territory (Planning and Land Management) Act 1988 (Cth), while the ACT Government's own Territory Plan governs everything else. And the territory's federal political weight is thin relative to its exposure: two Senators, the same number as the Northern Territory and a sixth of what any state gets regardless of population, plus three House of Representatives seats, Bean, Canberra and Fenner — meaning the jurisdiction most exposed to Commonwealth override has among the least leverage of any jurisdiction to prevent that power being used.
The risk to the future
One vote, one issue at a time — while the exposure itself never shrinks
The 2022 win proves the advocacy model can work, but it also shows how slow and contingent it is: 25 years, a sympathetic federal government, and a Senate count that went the ACT's way. Nothing in that precedent stops a future Parliament, on a different question and a different day's numbers, reaching the opposite result on any territory law — the 2023 Cash motion, defeated by only six votes, shows that possibility is live, not hypothetical. Layer that legal exposure onto an economic base that is not fully the ACT's own: a federal public service share that has fallen three years straight to 35 per cent, and roughly 45 per cent (approx.) of territory revenue tied to Commonwealth GST relativities and grant decisions the ACT does not set alone. Both trends are already moving in the same direction.
If a future Commonwealth government pursues faster APS decentralisation for its own budget reasons — a policy already under way — or a differently composed Parliament revisits territory rights on an issue less popular than voluntary assisted dying, the ACT has no constitutional shield to fall back on, only the same slow, evidence-heavy campaign that took a quarter-century to work once. A city-state that has spent 36 years proving it can govern still cannot guarantee, on any given subject, that it will keep being allowed to.