Federalism and democracy

Professor Graham Maddox writes that in the very moment of its invention, federalism was pitted against democracy. How can a system which in Australia is acknowledged on all sides to be a peculiar impediment to traditional Labor, and indeed to progressive Liberal, politics, be said to be conducive to democracy? Any objective audit of democracy will have to engage with the anti-democratic bias of the theory of federalism as well as the issues of democratic accountability that federalism presents