How come ACT (Australia capital territory) is not a state in Australia?

Question

Canberra is the capital, should it have it's own state?

Answer 1

Not big enough to be a State, it was created for the purpose of being the capital because Melbourne and Sydney were fighting over being the capital so it was decided canberra would be created for the sole purpose of being the capital. the ACT is smaller then most cities such as Sydney and stuff anyway and you can't call an area that small a state. so its a territory.

Answer 2

The only purpose of the ACT is for Canberra to be somewhere that is not NSW or Victoria, this means it is neutral territory. There is no need for it to be a full state.

If Canberra was part of a full state then decisions made there might favour that state over the other states, keeping it a territory with limited powers makes it unbiased as a seat of federal power.

Similar to the way Washington is in D.C.

Answer 3

I don't know if the District of Columbia was the first, but a number of countries have followed the pattern of having the capital on its own chunk of territory, perhaps most recently Brazilia and one of the Asian nations (Burma?)   The reasons given in answers 1 & 2 are typical.  In the case of the USA it was located between the southern plantation states and the northern more commercial states and between the small coastal states (RI, CT, NJ, DE, MD) and the larger states with holdings that extended inland.