Australia has six states but ten federal territories, most of them islands
Ask how Australia is divided and most people name six states and two territories. The full list is stranger: ten federal territories in all, including uninhabited sub-Antarctic volcanoes, a slice of Antarctica and specks of reef in the Coral Sea, plus one island whose residents insist they are not Australian at all.
Each of the six states, from Queensland and New South Wales to Tasmania and Western Australia, grew out of a British colony and keep their own constitutions, parliaments, courts and police. They handed certain powers to the federal government at Federation in 1901 but remain partly sovereign. The High Court sits above every state court as the final court of appeal.
Territories differ in law, if not always in practice. The Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory elect their own assemblies and chief ministers and send members to both houses of the federal parliament, yet Canberra can overturn their laws, something that rarely happens. Jervis Bay Territory, the third on the mainland, has no legislature and mostly borrows the ACT's laws. When Federation happened, the Northern Territory belonged to South Australia, and the land for the capital was part of New South Wales.
Seven external territories lie offshore: Christmas Island, the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Norfolk Island, the Coral Sea Islands, Ashmore and Cartier Islands, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, and the Australian Antarctic Territory. Each is shaped by its own Act of the federal parliament. The Cocos Islands voted to integrate in 1984, and together with Christmas Island they form the Australian Indian Ocean Territories, whose voters are counted with the Northern Territory in federal elections. Norfolk Island ran its own legislature from 1979 until 2015, and moves to fold it into Australia proper have not won islanders' formal consent.
The map has also shed territories. From 1926 to 1931 the Northern Territory was briefly split at the 20th parallel into North Australia and Central Australia. Papua New Guinea and Nauru were administered by Australia for varying periods between 1902 and 1975, and Papua New Guinea became independent under a 1975 act. Altogether the country spans the sixth-largest land area on Earth with nearly 33,000 kilometres of mainland coast.
Source: States and territories of Australia
