Public short-changed in local government inquiry
The State Government has announced that it is conducting an inquiry into the sustainability of local government.
It is only two months since IPART announced that it was opening an inquiry on the same subject, but this new initiative will, apparently, supersede the IPART exercise which hadn't got beyond drafting terms of reference and was scheduled to take a year to complete.
However, the little information that has been made available about the new inquiry suggests that its terms of reference will be much more restricted than originally intended.
In fact, it seems that the subject matter will be almost entirely limited to the funding of infrastructure and services, and this is reflected in the fact that the report will be completed within a few months.
It is a good question as to why the Government felt it necessary to pre-empt the IPART review and curtail the subject matter so drastically.
Of course, it is important that the financing of infrastructure be looked at, but this cannot be done in isolation.
There has to be a framework of functions and responsibilities within which financing applies.
The present ramshackle arrangement of local government is patently unfit for purpose, and tinkering with funding arrangements is not going to make it any better.
Raising money is less important than delivering value for money to ratepayers, and a consideration of this fundamental requirement demands a much more sweeping review of local government structure, particularly focussing on the relationship between councils and the communities they (supposedly) serve.
Why isn't the inquiry founded on the sustainability of communities, which is supposed to be the purpose of local government, instead of on some accounting process which is only a means to an end and, probably, not even the most important one?
The body responsible is the Committee on State Development, and the public is only being allowed until April 26 to make submissions on the subject.
The haste to close opportunities for public intervention (with the minimum of publicity), the inadequacy of the study's scope and the rushed production of the report, together with the abandonment of the much more comprehensive IPART report, all smack of political expediency, leading up to the elections to be held in September this year.
What was the Government afraid would emerge from the IPART report that it wanted to smother?
The public is being short-changed again, and this usually suggests that something is being planned that we aren't going to like.
One wonders how much of the Committee report has already been written.
SOURCE:
Email, 10 Apr 2024
Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy