South Perth: Find Out What Your Candidates Stand For

I'm not a resident of South Perth (although I was when I first came to WA in 1977), but I applaud the South Perth community for taking the initiative to call a Town Hall meeting at which all seven candidates for the 11th March state election will be able to talk to and be quizzed by the community on an equal footing.

If you are a voter in the South Perth electorate, particularly if you are unsure who to vote for or want to find out how each of the candidates would proposes to represent you on issues of particular concern in South Perth, then take a little of your time to go along.

Telling NSW What We Already Knew In WA

There's an intelligent and incisive assessment by Marie Samson in 'Government News' (http://www.governmentnews.com.au/2017/02/forced-council-mergers-nsw-government-got-wrong) of why forced local government amalgamations came such a cropper in NSW - all of which sounds horribly familiar to those of who were involved in the resistance in WA.

Indeed, coming so soon after the debacles in WA and Queensland, the NSW Government's 'bull-in-a-china-shop' approach can only be seen as a wilful and ideologically-driven refusal to learn from experience or to recognise facts.

An important issue raised in the assessment is clear identification of the roles of local and state governments. The government could have spoken about giving councils more scope and more political clout at state and federal level, rather than bypassing them with new agencies like Urban Growth and the Greater Sydney Commission. In essence, the state government is doing things that local government ought to be doing.

Sounds familiar to WA people fighting the oppressive and arbitrary decision-making of the State-sponsored Development Assessment Panels.

So, to make it easy-to-understand for any government thinking about local government amalgamations, here are the six key factors identified from the NSW experience:

n  Be clear and honest about your intentions from the start

n  Back them up with sufficient evidence and share this evidence

n  Engage closely with communities around what the benefits are to them

n  Listen to and act on residents’ concerns

n  Be consistent with your reasoning and apply it evenly and fairly

n  Build independence into the process, including drawing boundaries, engaging with communities and assessing proposals

Time for Voters' Question Time

Day after day, week after week, year after year, we see parliamentary question time (both federal and state) degenerate into a farce of dorothy-dixers, political point-scoring, obfuscation and name-calling. 

Very occasionally, but increasingly rarely, some useful information is elicited. 

Both sides of politics, whether in government or opposition, are equally to blame, so let's think about how we might actually get some value from Question Time.

Here's a 'radical' (ie democratic) thought. Instead of politicians setting the questions, why not let voters do so? 

The on-line technology to do this already exists. In the UK, e-petitions gaining 10,000 valid signatures will get a response from Government and those with 100,000 will be considered for debate in the Parliament (https://petition.parliament.uk). In the past two years, 380 e-petitions have received a government response and 48 have been debated in Parliament - sometimes with a full day of debate. 30 are currently awaiting a government response and 7 a debate in Parliament.

Only 14 petitions with the requisite 100,000 signatures have been refused debate in Parliament.

Incidentally, e-petitions seem to be totally beyond the WA Parliament (which still requires hard copy with written signatures). E-petitions are accepted by the Federal Parliament, but are referred to the appropriate Minister rather than debated  under public scrutiny.

If our Parliaments and Government find e-petitions too threatening, perhaps we could (in the words of Monty Python) make the move 'from accountancy to lion-taming via banking' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azkFz1ZbXyU). 

It would be a brave PM, Premier or Minister who responded to a question from voters by slagging off the questioners or effectively refusing to answer the question.

Victory in NSW - But For Whom?

As reported in an earlier post (http://ianrker-vincent.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/lest-we-forget-wa-parallels-in-nsw.html) drawing on reports in Government News, the Government of new NSW Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has done an about face on some forced local government amalgamations.

Regional amalgamations will be abandoned, but the people of Sydney are not so lucky. Sydney communities whose councils have already been merged will not be given the opportunity to de-merge by plebiscite and those currently the subject of court action will depend upon the outcome of those actions.

As Keith Rhoades, President of Local Government NSW, has stated, this is clearly a political compromise that is likely to satisfy no-one (http://www.lgnsw.org.au/news/media-release/media-release-political-compromise-lost-opportunity).

However, there are some winners as well as the obvious losers. The National Party will welcome the decision as it will help them avoid further humiliations like the 2016 Orange by-election, where the Nationals lost to the Shooters and Fishers Party after having held the seat for 69 years (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-21/orange-by-election-won-by-shooters,-fishers-and-farmers-party/8043658),

The 'split-decision' (even, one might opine, schizophrenic decision) appears unlikely to help the NSW Government in Sydney electorates, where there is strong opposition to forced amalgamations, but there is one group that will be overjoyed by the continuation of previous decisions in the city.

Across Australia, the property development industry has been actively calling for and supporting forced local government amalgamations - it has also been substantially contributing to political party funds. Their interests, though, are not those of the communities within which they operate and upon which they have the greatest impacts. Larger councils, the property interests consider, are more likely to approve ultra-high-density developments that give them the greatest profits - partly because they will be more party-political but more because they are less able to give community-based scrutiny to complex development proposals.

http://www.governmentnews.com.au/2017/02/regional-council-mergers-halted-sydney-mergers-stand/?platform=hootsuite