“Victorians deliver damning verdict on local councils!” the Herald Sun screamed from its front page yesterday morning. According to the story, more than half of Victorians have had a gutful of local councils and want them “abolished”, replaced with larger regional authorities, or to have the state government take over their duties. And thereby hangs a tale or two.
A few months ago, a very senior Victorian government minister was visiting Darebin Council, in Melbourne’s inner north. Darebin covers Northcote, Thornbury, Preston and Reservoir, and is bisected by Bell Street, the “Hummus Curtain”, that once separated Labor booths in the north from Green booths in the south (the divide has since moved northwards).
A senior council staffer was telling this very senior government minister about the complexities of managing a council covering such diverse areas — to which the VSGM replied that if he had his way, he’d abolish councils altogether, weren’t worth a pinch of dry piss, etc. The remark was taken at the time as arrogance and bluster by the Andrews government about the immovable frustrations of local government.
Now? Well, the poll, by RedBridge of 1189 Victorians finds that 45% want to abolish local councils, and support for having fewer local councils is substantial: 57% compared with 24% against.
There are no details of the polling method or selection process either there or on RedBridge’s website, but there’s no reason to doubt it was competently done. What’s notable is that it was done and is now in play, because RedBridge is of course the consultancy outfit of former Labor/Dan Andrews consigliere Kos Samaras. So by an incredible coincidence, he and his former employers are working on the same unprompted issue at the same time.
So why a push against local councils now? All governments find them annoying, and they are sometimes corrupt or dysfunctional or both, but they handle the thousands of issues that are purely local, at a local level. They also provide a level of actual democracy, in which people can serve their community and get elected without the support of party machines.
There’s the rub, of course, because such democracy is increasingly locking Labor out, especially in inner-city areas. In Yarra (covering Richmond, Fitzroy and Collingwood) there are no Labor councillors, two Socialists and a five-person Greens majority. Darebin had four Greens and a left independent until recently. Merri-bek (formerly Moreland, Brunswick and Coburg) has Greens and Socialists. And Maribyrnong (Footscray) has one Socialist and is likely to go further left next election.
This process will only spread. Teals will begin to contest councils in eastern suburbs and displace old chamber-of-commerce types, and left independents will pop up in middle- and outer-suburban councils in the north and west.
Labor’s ability to do anything about this is limited by the neutering of branches in the federal intervention, and by the state party largely being a ghost organisation run from Dan Central. Labor has tried to contest this by playing up minor flurries — appointing a “monitor” to Yarra, because the council, gasp, had extended debates about policy (heh, also a Greens councillor sitting while on charges — later dismissed — for assault).
So why hasn’t Labor tried to do something about this before? Well, it did, and in fact this latest push is not so much dealing with the problem as with the mess left by the last attempt to solve it. In 2018, Adem Somyurek, back from brief sinbin exile, swept into the ministry of local government and took up the plan to change the way local councils are elected. Like most councils, Victorian councils have a proportional system, usually based around three wards of about three members each, thus allowing for a mix of localism and fair representation. The Somyurek-driven plan was to turn this into nine single-member wards, a manifestly anti-democratic move, against the global current towards proportional representation.
That was imposed on multiple councils (including Darebin) before the last council elections, and it did help the wheezing, broken-down Labor machine to get a couple of councillors. But Labor left Yarra, Merri-bek and others alone, knowing it’d have an inner-city revolt on its hands if it didn’t do it from strength.
Sadly for it, that strength ebbed when Somyurek was filmed by spook cameras, caught allegedly running a branch-stacking operation from the borrowed office of the senator with the longest tenure on the Parliamentary Joint Intelligence Committee. The drive to “reform” — to be sacking councils, Somyurek is recorded as saying to some tame nong in the tapes — flagged somewhat as Somyurek was re-defenestrated.
Labor also realised something else: councils with nine ultra-local wards were no guarantee of Labor success in a new era of independents. In fact, it could prove to be a nightmare, a series of incubators for enthusiastic local movements and ideal for local community leaders who knew everything and everyone in a 36-block area. Labor was coming to understand that the quality of its local potential candidates was declining, with the term “weirdo misfits” thrown around.
So now, quite possibly, it is desperate to back out of completing the “reform” process, but equally desperate not to revert to the old system — and give Greens and the left a win. Further amalgamation is a great way out of that, creating mega-councils in the name of 21st-century efficiency. It would also, I presume, try to further restrict the authority of councillors and give more power to the bureaucracy.
No one is going to abolish local authorities per se, unless power has made them stark-raving megalomaniacal — and Dan is a good two years away from that. But you could just have fully administered, non-elected local authorities if you were really bloody-minded.
You would, however, create, as your enemy, the greatest popular front imaginable, a coalition joining inner-urban anarchists to property owner activists, all concerned that every road-use alteration and planning application for a shed would either be handled by a bureaucrat or by someone in, gasp, Treasury.
Amalgamation? Well, the approach would be to do a repeat Jeff Kennett: combine inner-urban areas with their adjacent middle-outer urban areas to dilute the left and Greens power. Thus Yarra would join to Boorondara (Hawthorn-Camberwell), Darebin to Banyule (Bullen-Templestowe) and Merri-bek with the People’s Juche Democratic Republic of North Korea.
I must say this is worth it to see Yarra Greens’ Anab Mohamud fight it out with the tweeded burghers of Canterbury, and Maribyrnong Socialist Jorge Jorquera wade with sword and flame into the perpetual cesspool of Labor-dominated Brimbank. But the loss would be of genuine local representation. With such vast areas to cover and consider, the bureaucracy would run the joint, which is surely the point.
It would also provide its own point of resistance, as councils combined for the right to stay apart. I have seen Yarra socialist Stephen Jolly lock arms with blue-rinse National Trust ladies in protests and it’s a beauti– well, it’s a sight. Not only that, but council amalgamations may actually revive the Liberal Party. Buried in the polling, but not featured in the story, is the fact that 40% of respondents believe their council has the right priorities, compared with 26% who don’t. There is thus a residual consent to many councils as they are.
But it would be tempting for Labor to de facto destroy local representation, particularly as regards planning, since council bureaucrats are almost uniformly pro-development as so many of them move on to high-paid jobs as planning “consultants” for developers.
And this is all about to go to the next level on steroids with the further promulgation of the Suburban Rail Loop. The SRL will never be completed, and doesn’t need to be. It’s a device to create special development zones that remove residents’ rights to file planning objections, to smooth compulsory purchase, and to hand the land to integrated developers — on the model by which Lendlease got a deal for blocks of Melbourne CBD property in exchange for building Melbourne’s darling baby white elephant, the Metro tunnel. The new planning rules for the SRL kicked in just before Christmas. It’ll be open slather from now on.
How good would it be for Labor to do this, and simultaneously knock out a few councils of sufficient locality to become a focus of resistance? Especially when you consider what we’ll get — charmless malls, Woolies, Coles, JB Hifi and Officeworks to the horizon. With this throat-clearing about local councils — no one gives a rat’s about the shires — Labor is getting the thing rolling.
The final notable feature of this is where it got announced: on the front page of the mortal enemy. Yes, the leadership of the Hun has thrown in the towel. With Labor here for eight more years, barring catastrophe, and aiming for 12, News Corp’s fading Melbourne tabloid, now with the weight and heft of a freesheet, has run up the white flag and joined the caravan (the Danavan?).
It’ll mainly attack the Greens, of course, but it has given up on the Looooserberals, especially in the John Pesutto era. The fix is in — we’re a democratically elected one-party state! Make every municipality a Danicipality! Build a red bridge to the future, one Hun front page at a time!
Odd that Guy appears to see no merit in the Metro tunnel, and believes that “The SRL will never be completed, and doesn’t need to be”. A quick glance at population projections for Melbourne show how important both projects are, unless you prefer more and more road congestion and freeway building. Part of reducing emissions is to increase public transport usage. Imagine the gridlock in twenty years time if neither project were built..
For the uselessness of Metro, see Alan Daviess columns in the old Urbanist blog we used to run. SRL doesnt need to be completed to do the property boondoggle, which is its only purpose
This seems to be the irreconcilable challenge – modern infrastructure projects will have a cross-council impact and need to overcome certain localised resistance.
Train lines may benefit many in a city but could cut through a particularly wealthy (and vocal) suburb. Likewise I can imagine a greens aligned council saying “no factory in my suburb”, meaning important (but undesirable) industries keep falling in the poorest and least able to resist suburbs.
Peppermint Grove is the classic example – an elite enclave right on excellent public transport networks remains the land of low density and very large houses.
Factories are built on the cheapest suitable land, where they are welcomed as providing jobs. Greenbashing won’t change facts.
Good to know. And as a footnote, let’s not forget that after the recent election Somyurek is back in parliament, at the expense of Fiona Patten. Do we get the politicians we deserve?
For all the talk about the wonders of democracy and representation, the reality is something else entirely. Just imagine how different it would all be if all politicians took respect for democracy and the voters as their starting point, before their thirst for power, their internal and external dirty party politics, the desperate hunt for
bribesdonations and all the rest of the fun and games.Fiona Patten, what a loss. Somyurek defeating her is as horrible as Barnaby Joyce defeating Tony Windsor.
It’s enough to make you want emigrate to Mars
Of course, Victorian Labor could try to recreate itself as a (moderately) democratic mass party, run good municipal candidates with strong local party backing, and… oh forget it.
As an ex-bureaucrat, my anecdotal observation is that local Councils seem to be functioning better than State and Federal, which are clearly pretty broken. Councillors and staff are much more in reach of the people they serve.
I suspect you’re right. It goes a long way to explaining why the state and federal politicians regard local politicians with contempt, resentment and just a hint of fear. The better local politicians are a permanent rebuke to them.
I defer to Guy’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Melbourne’s local councils, and no doubt there are messy political undertones to every possibility. But, as a resident of the (bigger economy than Tasmania) Brisbane City Council, a result of the amalgamation of 20 councils 98 years ago, having all these little councils made up of a suburb and a half and with all different rules and regulations sounds…well, a bit silly really. Wouldn’t it make sense for Melbourne (and Sydney, and…) to actually be a proper city run as one city?
Oh yes, because Brisbane over the last century is a model of urban management
Sorry Guy but tiny local councils lack the necessary resources and foster inefficiency. Economies of scale and standardization of regulations across Brisbane has achieved much. I have lived in Sydney with its seemingly endless “Council every 200 mètres” along with dealing with a Sydney local council for DA Approval and I know which I prefer (and it’s not small local councils). They are a hangover from a bygone era.
Destroyed heritage, terrible development, lack of place, carved up neighbourhoods, lack of service responsiveness, democratic mediation, lack of capacity to resist power through subsidiarity and megalomaniac city level white elephant planning multiple times is what Brisbane mega city govt has achieved.
The point is that politics will interfere with every council, regardless of its structure or size. As a resident of Brisbane I don’t think some of your criticism is accurate or warranted, but even if true there are advantages of consistency and scale from which other large cities governed as tiny duchies could benefit.
No, i believe that yr notion of ‘efficiency’ favours bureaucratic authoritarianism over democracy, however clownish it might be at times. The circular logic in your idea of ‘efficiency’ is that it presumes there is already agreement on what should be done. So it’s a stitch up, presented as a truth. Multiple councils allow for differing ideas of the good path. Melb wld have lost carlton, the vic market, social services and green space without them – all things many people would now agree as good. Brisbane’s unitary model allowed for wholesale destruction in a way i reckon the clear majority of Brisbaners regret. I wld suggest that is evidence towards the negative role of consolidated mega councils.
The same can be said for Sydney and Melbourne etc etc, just at a higher cost to Ratepayers. As a Ratepayer I am interested in the efficient delivery of services not having them duplicated across multiple tiny insignificant councils. I have experienced both and I will stick with larger Council’s that have scale thanks.
Brisbane has done a whole lot better than Sydney or Melbourne as it has a holistic view of the majority of the urban area as it’s focus. They certainly haven’t done everything right and there is certainly politics involved (including the continual harassment of Nicole Johnstone and to a lesser extent the Greens), some of the main roads could be better, but as a resident I would suggest that the holistic planning and service provision for an entire city is better than the piecemeal approach that Guy Rundle seems to support.
The problem arising from that is the Mayor of Melbourne then has political heft rivalling his Danness…
Yes, and who exactly would see that as a problem, rather than a useful feature and a valuable part of democratic governance, is important.
Big city mayors can be powerful political figures well beyond just their city, and that is obviously likely in Australia where the states’ capital cities concentrate so much of the population and the wealth. The UK has few such dominant cities but London is obviously one. The power of London’s mayor was such that Thatcher found it intolerable. She could not control it, so she forced the abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986. In Russia during recent times almost the only bodies capable of expressing any dissent from Putin’s goverment have been city councils and their leaders; not that they’ve got any joy from it.
That’s only a problem if the heft is misused. Do you not like what Sally’s doing?
In any case Melbourne’s mayor, aligned with the Property Council, is voted in on the basis of a gerrymander, introduced by Kennett, supported by the ALP, which gives all property owners, many living overseas, two votes for every citizen vote, a gerrymander designed to favour developers. When the overseas owners couldn’t be bothered voting, they were pressured to do so by the imposition of fines, all designed to ensure developers’ control of MCC with the endorsement of the Victorian Labor Party.
The liberals tried something similar here in Sydney, but Clover Moore and co just keep winning. At the last local elections she lost ground only to her left.
Would seem to make sense because apart from anything else’s there is a level of consistency. I live on the Gold Coast, second biggest council after Brisbane and sixth biggest city in Australia. And when you are managing everything from planning, building, and development applications, to health, storm water, beaches, libraries, sewage, and water, consistency is not only important, but much easy for those trying to do business.
It’s different over here in Perth too. Colin Barnett tried and failed a moderate level of amalgamation a few years ago – apart from all of the micro councils in the swanky western suburbs joining up, it was just to pair up adjacent councils over the metro area. Even that fell over – although clearly suggesting that the amalgamation of South Perth and Victoria Park would be “South Park” didn’t make it look like they were taking the whole thing seriously.
But the rationalisation wasn’t done for political reasons, as there are no party politics in local government in WA. Every councillor is an independent. Which makes it seem so weird that it’s so highly politicised in other states, but at the same time understandable that state premiers are highly motivated to local government reform.
The Barnett amalgamation proposals were caused by his inability to accept that the many hundreds of local councillors here were necessary. They completely outnumbered the representatives in State parliament, and he felt vaguely threatened by that, and it also offended his instinct for total power in the hands of a few. Queensland went through with their amalgamations earlier and that exercise did not save money and was a complete disaster. I believe Qld copied the UK (of all places), whose amalgamations of counties were also disfunctional and expensive. The simple fact is that people want to have a say in what happens where they live. Our State govt has recently insisted on reducing the numbers of councillors, even though they are mostly unpaid volunteers. With fewer councillors the ability of, say, an ambitious developer to push projects through is enhanced. He can persuade 2, but he can’t persuade 10. The very small shire where I live shares resources with surrounding shires exactly as Barnett proposed for our amalgamation. When that was put on the table 70% of ratepayers turned out to stop it. Two neighbouring councils amalgamated resulting in annual rates doubling over the next few years. The WA govt tried to make it look good by giving out huge grants to them for ‘enhancement’ projects, but the fact remains that governments of whatever level should be FOR THE PEOPLE. And never for the few in charge.
We cannot have too many representatives.
If that is true, presumably the ideal is for every one of us to be a representative; in other words, direct democracy in which we all govern without any representatives.
Yeah, nah.
I live in one of those swanky western suburbs with councils that share some resources and don’t really provide much in terms of service. My area has poor road planning, and I use services provided by adjacent councils.
Economies of scale, please.
Another issue on the local vs greater city councils is what their responsibilities and roles are, in relationship to the state government?
Some European cities are more the greater macro Brisbane model overseeing PT, parking, infrastructure, sewage, roads and many services including pre-school, elderly etc., but there are also small local or district elected councils (any EEA/EU citizens can vote in if resident) who fit in doing rubbish collection, street cleaning, gardens, community services, housing/apt. regulations etc..
Apart from the delineation of roles, there is also a hazard where the central government could squeeze or strangle an unfavoured city government or council of income streams for political purposes.