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From
workshop 2: How the People are Left Out - the challenge to renew Australia's
democracy, Now We The People conference, 23.8.03 University of
Technology, Sydney In Grass Roots: Col Dunkley's Guide to Local Government, Geoffrey Atherden says there is some debate over whether prostitution or the law is the oldest profession. "But there is no debate over which is the oldest form of democratic government: it is local government". It might have just been a group of people sitting around a campfire but for most of human history that's been the real seat of government. With one or two exceptions, the left has traditionally ignored local government, preferring to concentrate its energies on state or national politics - or even better still international affairs. The left has managed to defend some terrible dictators over the years - remember when Robert Mugabe was a hero? - but has mostly turned its back on local government. So boring!!! It's not just the
left, though, that has put the kibosh on local government. The organised
right has also mostly treated it with disdain. This is borne out by the
fact that only 4 Australian Prime Ministers have started out in local
government - John Gorton (Kerang Shire Council), Ben Chifley (Abercrombie
Shire Council); Australia apparently has a world 'best practice' when it comes to holding elections. That why the Australian Electoral Commission is often sending teams aboard - and not just to Timor. But we hardly have a world 'best practice' democracy. And part of that is because of the weakness of local government in this country. In Australia, the first local government established in Australia was in Adelaide in 1840. Today there are 717 local councils for 19.7 million people. Local government employs 145,000 people and is responsible for $106.3 million's worth of infrastructure. But traditionally the role here is much smaller than those of other countries. In the UK, for instance, local government controls schools, public housing and utilities such as water. One of our Russian-born constituents in Port Phillip says that in the old Soviet Union local government's responsibilities extended to distributing cabbages and other vital foodstuffs to residents and paper and pens to schools. In Australia, local government's role until fairly recently has been confined to the '3Rs' - roads, rates and rubbish. So, no wonder then, as Col Dunkley has remarked, that to many people "local government is the sandpit of politics". But it could be much more - it could be the crucible for growing real democracy. Globalisation is partly responsible for opening up this possibility. As people feel increasingly disenfranchised from state and federal government, the spotlight has turned to local government. It is still a sphere of government where people feel they can have a say or should be able to have a say (not all local councils in Australia welcome community participation.) It's a bit like the ABC - people contact local government because there's still the faint race memory that it's their's. Sometimes, they come to us about issues that's aren't in our ballpark but it's because there's nowhere else to go. As a local councillor and now mayor, I find people often just want someone to talk to, to take notice. Federal governments might be able to send Australian troops to war in Iraq without even having a parliamentary debate, let alone a vote, but in local government we can't even pass a budget without a pretty open process allowing for public submissions. Residents can put in objections to every planning application and in our municipality they do. And that's without the governance reforms I'll discuss later. Another reason for the changing role of local councils is the shifting of responsibilities from federal and state levels to local government. Local governments now carry out an enormous range of functions, everything from meals on wheels to cultural development. We just lack the money to do it properly. The inquiry established by Wilson Tuckey, the Federal Minister for Regional Services, Territories and Local Government has already established that responsibilities and costs have filtered down to local government from other levels of government without the commensurate funding. This has been primarily to the advantage of the states. Funding needs to be boosted by at least a third to meet the estimated gap in local authority infrastructure funding each year. Too much of the infrastructure supplied by local government - such as road, drains, footpaths, libraries and community centres - is either obsolete, worn out, over-utilised or under-performing. Expectations are now firmly rooted in the twenty-first century but the method of revenue collection is grounded in the nineteenth century. Local government similar can't meet the demands of local communities if it is forced to rely on a property tax - rates - as its prime source of revenue. It's been estimated that federal funding for local government should be increased from $1.3 5 billion to $2.7 billion out of the GST windfall to meet this gap in funding. If local government's revenue were boosted in this fashion, then councils could redirect rates revenue to social and community needs specific to their own municipalities. Local government should be able to set its own local social and community priorities without external control or interference. At the broader level, receipt of Federal Assistance Grants, as they're called, could be conditional on the removal of rate capping restrictions currently imposed by some states. Payment of Federal Assistance Grants could be tied to local government reform which is further advanced in Victoria than other states. In fact, I will argue that local government reform is more important than constitutional reform. So why does local government need to be reformed? One reason is that some local government areas are just too small. There is a critical mass necessary for optimal service delivery. Prior to council amalgamation in Victoria, one of the councils that went on to form the City of Port Phillip was the City of Port Melbourne. It had less than 8000 people. The small size apparently had some advantages - anyone wanting anything done knew which pub to patronise to speak to a councillor - but it didn't allow the council to do much in a huge range of areas. It depended too much on whom you knew - not really a good basis for real modern democracy. The way that local government was reformed in Victoria by the Kennett Government a decade ago was wrong and has left many scars. It involved forced council amalgamations, compulsory competitive tendering, where 50 per cent of council services had to be tendered out, rate capping and two years of local rule by Kennett-appointed commissioners. Privatisation was often a disaster - communities lost services or had them replaced with inferior ones. Libraries closed down. Rate capping meant vital infrastructure and services could not longer be maintained. Council workforces shrank. And so did the number of councillors. For instance, in my patch, there were 33 councillors prior to amalgamation but only seven in the new council. Kennett told us we were to think of ourselves not as councillors representing local constituents but as a board of directors which was to give broad policy direction to the CEO and employees. Through legislation and other measures, power was shifted from democratically elected councillors to appointed officials. When Victorian backbenchers complained to Kennett that local mayors were getting more media coverage than they were, Kennett tried to nobble mayors by bringing back the maximum level of the mayoral allowance from $100,000 pa to $36,000 pa. That meant that most mayors couldn't afford to work full-time at being mayors - unless they had independent incomes, well-to-do spouses or businesses. The lexicon changed. Citizens become customers. This shift was so powerfully symbolic that the very resolution of the first democratically-elected Port Phillip Council was to resolve never to use the term customer but to always refer to our constituents as citizens. Ironically, in some ways, local government is much stronger and revitalised by the process unleashed by Kennett. It had to rethink its mission. It had to engage in many contests with the State Government to claw back rights, roles and responsibilities. It forced us all to look at how democracy operated in our patch and the view often wasn't pretty. I served under both regimes - I was also councillor in the old St Kilda Council prior to amalgamation - and local government was pretty moribund (though not in St Kilda!). In some instances, the operation of local councils in Victoria bore a startling resemblance to Arcadia Waters though the councillors were mostly old men in grey cardigans. Through a new peak body, the Victorian Local Governance Association, local government carved out a new role in politics and started to think about how to grow democracy at a local level. Since the election of the Bracks Government in 1999, rate capping has been scrapped but the mayoral allowance is capped. It's now $46,500 and a ridiculous complicated formula now applies. It's still not sufficient for a 70-hour week or the complexity of decisions that face local government. Councillors receive a maximum of $15,000 pa for what is often a 35-35 hour week. Compulsory (or compulsive, as many of us called it) competitive tendering has been replaced by 'best value' reviews of council services. The aim is to ensure that our services are continuously improving, relevant to the needs of the community and that they deliver value for money. Some would argue that the reforms of the 1980s and 90s broke the bureaucratic complacency of public institutions. Competition from the private sector has sent a chilled wind through most public agencies. Some would assert that that it has also assisted in creating conditions for innovation and consumer responsiveness. But, as we have seen, simple privatisation has not offered a palatable alternative as the private sector often failed the public during this period. The construction of the public as consumers created narrow and artificial limits to our ability to think through new relationships between government and the citizenry. The importation of private management culture failed to take account of the unique roles and values of public agencies and government. Local government in Victoria is now about to obtain constitutional recognition in the state constitution. We will obtain this recognition through an act of State Parliament. We also ought remember that what the state gives us, it can also take away - hence we could simply be abolished as tier of government by an act of parliament to change the constitution. This is one of the curious creatures of drafting of the state constitution. Of course, if local government were to be formally recognised in the Commonwealth constitution, it would be constitutionally entrenched. However, I wonder if our focus on this point obscures what I believe to be the more important question of what is happening in our communities in partnership with or even in spite of governments. I am not sure that recognition of local government in the state constitution will change the real power dependencies and nuances that barrier sustainable change for my community. We do live in an era of multi-layered governance - both in terms of the institutional and non-institutional. Approaching this topic from the perspective of governance - rather than constitutional independence - in my view is a far more valuable and accurate lens to purvey the issues that make a difference to the lives and environments that we seek to represent. I am persuaded by the views of Gerry Stoker who states, "To tackle the social and economic challenges confronting its area, a local authority needs not only to reach out to neighbourhoods and communities and across the voluntary and private sector partners but place itself in the complex web of local, regional, state, national and international connections. Local government can offer itself as a valuable partner, even leader, but it cannot command independence". Local government cannot command independence from the context in which we operate - irrespective of whether or not we are constitutionally recognised. It would be setting ourselves up for more inter-governmental turf and funding wars - an ongoing handball of blame that further undermines faith in public institutions. It is also a game of avoidance in terms of governments working in genuine partnerships in a multileveled governance structure. Different levels of government and agencies depend on one another - but none of us can establish conditions for perfect oversight. The political challenges that this presents is again, aptly summarised by Stoker as he parodies a politician: "Vote for me I can guarantee the delivery of very little because the system is very complex and the levers of control don't work" provides a somewhat uncomfortable campaigning platform. It doesn't need to be this way. Firstly, we can start rethinking the roles and responsibility of the different levels of government. In my view, the Commonwealth Government should put its emphasis on nation building whilst state government should focus on capacity building and have responsibility for assessing infrastructure backlogs in conjunction with local government authorities. (At this point, I will ignore Col Dunkley's most famous quip. When asked about what was wrong with local government, he relied, "State Government"! It's very tempting to argue the case for getting rid of state governments but I fear the silly states' rights arguments will always win the day, particularly to the north and west.) The division I've just outlined would allow local government to concentrate on community building - delivering basic property-based infrastructure such as roads and footpaths and implementing social and community-based programs determined on a local basis. Failure to adequately provide, maintain or renew infrastructure at the local level directly impacts on the Commonwealth's efforts and ability to build the nation and improve national competitiveness. For example, a complex system of export incentives, national rail and port improvements will count for nothing if large road vehicles are unable to use local roads and bridges to reach railheads or ports. Or to use another example, the digital revolution won't happen without that last kilometre of copper to the home. Secondly, we need to start rethinking not about government but governance at the local level. At the City of Port Phillip, a review of governance was part of a broader mission of the growing local democracy recently embarked on. Our council was prepared to challenge and review the process of decision-making. At a time when we all intuitively feel that trust and confidence in public institutions is at all time low, it was pleasing to see that hundreds of our citizens were prepared to read discussion papers, attend focus groups and community forums to talk about what are the principles of good governance that encourage active citizenship. The ongoing theme that came out of our research is that, in the face of time poverty, cynicism towards governmental institution, people yearn for an active citizenry and governments that enable this. We have witnessed a change from traditional local government to a more complex network of citizens, governments and agencies involved in local governance. Initiatives to tackle unemployment, to improve health, to reduce crime and to build sustainable communities are being taken across old boundaries. For instance, our council worked with local residents, churches, welfare organisations, our local Federal MP, and the Community and Public Sector Union to keep our local Centrelink branch in South Melbourne. Our constituents would otherwise have had to travel long distances and on numerous forms of public transport to visit Centrelink. Action can be planned and implemented in neighbourhoods and regions as well as in town halls and civic offices. In the case of our municipality, the third council meeting of the month in the town hall has been replaced by a neighbourhood forum out in the community. Learning is taking place very fast as managers, politicians and citizens make more sense of a complex world. The conversations within neighbourhoods are alive to the different communities that inhabit shared space, to the conflicting sets of interests to be balanced. One of our public spaces, Talbot Reserve, next to the National Theatre in St Kilda, used to be a no go-zone for most people. It's been reclaimed - and reclaimed for everyone - following a series of design workshops involving street sex workers, drug users, homeless people, local agencies and local residents. Part of the solution has putting on a dinner so that people who never normally had anything to do with each other could discover what they had in common and contemplate working together for a mutually satisfactory outcome. New communication technologies can assist in connecting up local communities. One local council in Victoria, Casey, which covers a new growth corridor on Melbourne's southeast, now webcasts its council meetings. Council webpages can host community forums. Electronic newsletters and other info and links can be emailed to constituents. In our community, 70 per cent of local residents use the internet. Web communities are also powerful means of organising local campaigns. For instance, the campaign to protect the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda, an icon in the music and comedy scene, has largely been waged electronically. The real potential of local governance is only fully realised when we have powerful partnerships between people and the elected council. Our 'growing democracy' project recognises that genuine bottom-up local processes can give both individuals and organisations powerful new voices in the face of globalisation. It is within this context that I believe that local government needs to focus on our need for norms of governance. I am not convinced that that having a top-down imposed constitutional recognition ought be our priority. But new sorts of interaction are emerging which don't involve local people off loading their problems onto local agencies; instead they involve a shared or negotiated process of planning action requiring very different behaviours from all concerned. This raises new questions.
Some rules can't be imposed by governments - they are subjects for future conversations not regulation. If local governance is to play a role in community leadership, these questions have to faced head on. Local representatives are coming to terms with new structural arrangements, with partnerships and executive and scrutiny roles. But they are also struggling to find a role within new, more negotiated relationships with local citizens. Is the nature of local politics changing? And how are the representatives changing in response? In Victoria, a recent census by the Municipal Association of Victoria revealed that the average councillor is male, aged between 46 and 55 years, married or living in a de facto relationship with no children under 16 or other dependents living with them, and self-employed. Obviously, this is hardly representative - and I certainly don't fit that bill myself. I'm female, just turned 40, and separated with 3 kids 16 and under. We need to make it easier for younger people, women, indigenous Australians and people from non-English speaking backgrounds to stand for local government. These are the issues that I confront in my work everyday. Whilst I am open-minded, I am not convinced that the first port priority is constitutional recognition. Let's concentrate on local government reform and getting local governance as democratic as possible. It would be a travesty if the tales of the Arcadia Waters immortalised in Grass Roots were to be seen as some form of reality TV. Thank you
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